Watch this video, then see my comments below…
I’ve been watching a lot of Southerprepper1’s content lately, and I always enjoy his calm and rational approach to prepping. But the video above got me to wondering if we’re going too far in a sense with our preparedness efforts.
For those who chose not to watch the video yet, it’s basically about how important firewood can be to your survival during winter and how it (the firewood) could become contaminated during a nuclear fallout, which is something that, like he says, almost nobody has fully considered.
Kudos to him for bringing up something that most of us probably haven’t given a second thought to. And he’s not wrong either.
But what bothers me most is that we, as preppers, might be taking our concerns a bit too far these days. After all, what are the odds that we’ll ever have such a problem, and if we did, is firewood contamination going to even make the top ten list of problems after a nuclear exchange? Perhaps, but probably not.
Besides, it’s not like most of us can’t figure out how to stay warm with enough clothes, blankets and sleeping bags if we had to. What about using firewood to cook food? That’s not crucial either, since most canned food, for instance, can be eaten without being heated. How about boiling water? Use a Berkey or just have plenty of water stored.
Honestly, I might be more concerned about opening my chimney flue–rightly or wrongly–thereby exposing the house to radioactive ash than I would be about needing firewood for the aforementioned purposes.
Truth be told, if we actually had to shelter inside of our house right now for weeks on end–because about two weeks is how long most fallout is expected to be truly dangerous–I’m not sure that we could. Why? Because a lot of our preparedness items, including water barrels, are in the detached garage. It’s only maybe thirty feet from my front door, but that distance will feel like a LONG way away if there’s nuclear ash raining down on my head.
Yes, I’ve still got a lot of work to do in the coming spring before I’d feel like we’re prepared, and watching videos like the above don’t make me feel any better about where we’re at, but I am truly beginning to wonder if we’re focusing on the right problems.
Don’t get me wrong, I still occasionally get people who email me about one catastrophic event or another, and I do my best to calm them down, but I really feel like we’re focusing on the wrong problems. After all, isn’t civil unrest here in America or even economic collapse more likely than a nuclear exchange? And aren’t natural disasters still more likely than either of those? And would you not agree that a personal disaster, such as losing a job or illness, even more likely than that? I would think so.
As such, I think we need to reassess what we’re really preparing for rather than jumping to prepare for the latest [fill in the blank] concern. Now, I’m not saying a nuclear exchange or fallout are out of the realm of possibility, they’re not. What I am saying is that they’re much further down on the list of concerns, just as a supervolcano eruption is even further down the list.
Yes, we can worry about and try to prepare for just about any event one can imagine. But, at some point, we have to prioritize and, like it or not, avoid getting sucked into the latest [fill in the blank] concern to be worried about because we can only do so much.
Remember that we only have so much time, money, and mental energy to give…use it wisely.
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