Gone are the days when the tacticool boos were all prepper conspiracy theorists buying beans and rice in bulk to store in their fallout shelter (actually a pair of surplus shipping containers buried in their back yards) in order to weather the impending nuclear Armageddon.
The times have changed since I first got interested in prepping, thanks to Mad Max and my crazy uncle’s insistence that a nuclear apocalypse was coming. Indeed, the days of my coming-of-age in the art/hobby/task of prepping, where the Zombie Apocalypse was the Armageddon-du-jour and .22LR reigned supreme are also long gone.
These days, the new hotness is the Civil War. No, not the Alex Garland film. That was thoroughly unbelievable. Texas and California on the same side? Inconceivable! Everything else was accurate, though. Right?
Right??
Well, some of it was believable. I’ve seen enough shit to believe that, for example, that scene with the two militiamen digging a mass grave for people they had deemed ‘un-American’ and casually killing someone for not being white is very likely to happen, should America descend into anarchy and that anarchy should be of the type where the governments of the continental states all team up and engage in a conventional war with 2-3 sides.
But that possibility is exceedingly remote. (The mass grave… Not so much…)
That being said, that possibility is the one everyone seems to be prepping for. Which means all the tacticool boos are kitting themselves out like high-speed operators, ready to kick down doors and do hood-rat shit in the night under NODs.
Well, as a man who’s kicked down a few doors and done a bit of hood-rat shit in the night under NODS, I have opinions on how this is to be done. As a man who’s been a student of history and politics and a prepper long enough to watch multiple trends rise and fall in the topic, I have opinions on the applicability of this sort of prepping to what might actually happen in the near future.
This post is an intro to a series of posts I’m going to be writing. I’m going to be contrasting both the ideas of what people are prepping for to the actual likelihood of those ideas turning into reality. I’m also (and primarily) going to be talking about the actual applicability of the current hotness to both those ideals and the more likely reality.
If you already know my qualifications, you’ll understand that I’m speaking from experience, and not simply pulling shit out of my ass or basing it in theory that’s only been tested at a flat range, during an Airsoft game or on a Larp out on BLM land. If you don’t know my qualifications to talk on this subject, I don’t know you well enough to actually discuss my past in any detail with you. Suffice it to say that I’m a veteran and I have this experience. If you need proof, go pound sand. If that means you’re not going to read, then I’m okay with that. If you’re going to shout ‘stolen valor!’ in the comment section, I’m going to delete your comment and block you from posting more. And if you track me down IRL and shout ‘stolen valor’, you’re gonna find out what happens when you falsely accuse a veteran of stolen valor. Also, you’re probably not going to find out what happens when you track down a short-tempered veteran you encountered on the internet, because that would require you to have the ability to find out things after you got stand-your-grounded by a guy who has a very real reason to believe you represent a threat, you lunatic motherfucker. I’d tell you to get a life, but I plan to take yours for doing something so out of pocket as that.
Why all the hostility, Matt?
Well, because things have changed since I got into this stuff. Back in the day when I was in the Army, politics were personal ideals that you kept to yourself, except for late nights at the bar with your buddies. Prepping was a fairly apolitical activity rooted in a mistrust of the government and politics itself meant ‘how to run the government’.
But, now, it’s different. The tactical scene is overwhelmingly populated with right-wing MAGAts who wear their political beliefs loudly and proudly and think that Marxism is both when anyone (including private corporations for some god-forsaken reason) does anything that isn’t selfishly capitalistic and loudly ‘patriotic’ (and by ‘patriotic’, they mean paying lip-service to right-wing politics). The prepping scene is full of the same kinds of idiots, though to be fair, there remains a lot more common sense there, and many of the right-wing morons have the common sense to keep their politics to themselves.
But what’s worst of all, the political right has decided to embrace fascism, in all of its racist, sexist, bigoted nuance. And in doing so, they’ve abandoned any believable pretense at actually upholding the ideals upon which this country was founded, and are trying to undo much of the progress we’ve made in the past 200+ years.
So the fact that my own personal take is that “the Second Amendment is for everyone” includes queer people (and, gasp, traaaaaaaans people!) and “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” was very rightly permanently affixed to the Statue of Liberty as one of the most fitting poems to greet the immigrants who comprise the vast majority of the US’s population is a source of antagonism within this scene.
And I don’t rightly give a fuck what kinds of bad feels someone gets when they find out that I’m here not just to protect the dolls, but to train and organize them. And if I have to, I will lead the dolls in an effort to protect themselves. And anyone, of any ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion or background is welcome in my vision of this nation, subject only to the strictures laid forth by Karl Popper in The Open Society And Its Enemies; that to be truly tolerant, we must be intolerant of the intolerance.
You will find individual entries in this series categorized under Politics (there will be a link below, or above, I can’t remember how this theme organizes categories). In addition, I will be filing entries under the appropriate child categories of Predictions, Prepping and Tactical Stuff, with the last one likely being the biggest when all is said and done.
All in all, I’ve had a lot of ideas of non-fiction that bears writing, and this is the best place for me to put it. So if I have any regular readers, you can expect more updates.
For those of you who might be disappointed that this isn’t more fiction, worry not. I’ll be publishing a new book soon, which will build upon a lot of the themes I’ll be discussing in this series. And I’m back to writing Jerry and the Goddesses, with the penultimate book in Jerry’s long tale approaching the end right now, and only one more story to be told about him. I’ve got some cover work to do on two more books, and I have about half a dozen drafts in various states of completion.
As always, if you want to support me, you can always join my Patreon or buy me a Ko-Fi. I don’t make a living doing this stuff, which is why I’m so absent and produce so slowly. I doubt I’ll ever make a living this way, but if I could, y’all could bet your asses that I’d start making more TikTok and YouTube videos and be pushing out books at a faster rate.
So, yeah. Help me afford decent covers, please. I’m begging you. I’m so goddamn broke! AAAAAAHHHH!!!