Today I decided to do a rare blog post. Most of what I have to say I just put out on the air. However, next week I have three awesome guests lined up and that will take up a lot of air time and I feel this information needs to go out today.
I have received a ton of email about the new FBI program that lists “preppers” as potential terrorists. This is a real confirmed report and OathKeepers has obtained a copy of the actual document, you can see their report about it here. Of course the media is continuing to sensationalize us every chance they get, we are wholesale lumped in with every extremist group you can imagine despite the fact that the majority of us are just normal working folks who have decided to be prepared for some highly probable events like economic and natural disasters.
Even National Geographic and similar networks are doing documentary style shows on prepping. Some of these are pretty decent and some following the typical lines of showing the most extreme examples and even then you can tell the people are being prompted to look more extreme than they are. The Southern Poverty Law Center is attacking anyone who mentions prepping as a “hate group” from OathKeepers to main stream media’s Glenn Beck. When you look at all this you may feel that prepping is less accepted by the general population than any time in recent history, you would be wrong if you believed that though.
We are seeing a full court press for the exact reasons I have told you about from the very early days of TSP. The government and liberal media do not understand or like prepping and homesteading because it creates people who don’t need them. This has always been the case and lumping in anyone who goes beyond the governments pathetic recommended three days of supplies with extreme nut jobs has always been the modus operandi of big media and big government. Simply put independent free minded and self sufficient people are difficult to govern with wasteful spending, excessive taxation and so called “social justice” programs.
I don’t care if you are a liberal or a libertarian a republican or a centrist, plant a garden and store up some food to be ready for hard times you start to change your thinking. If you then develop a means to defend your home and perhaps provide some of your own energy you become even more independent. Now see, independent people soon develop independent minds, such people think more critically and begin to ask questions. When you are trying to create a socialist utopia by spending over 20 trillion dollars of money we don’t have (the projected public debt by 2020), people asking questions is a bad thing.
Yet there have been preppers and media bias for them since the beginning of the cold war if not longer. So why now, why the full court press after the simple occasional media or government hack job after more than 50 years? Simply put because we are winning the battle for hearts and minds. The concept of actually taking care of yourself has started to reach a critical mass.
While many of the urbanites are still blind (and even many of them are waking up) my experience in the small town environment of Hot Springs has taught me a lot about the shift that has occurred since I began my work in 2008. Please understand I don’t claim responsibility for causing this shift, the political and economic climates and the many other folks out there spreading the message have done more than I have. Case in point, all the examples of people below are folks that had never heard of me until we met face to face.
In just about every business interaction I have had since coming to Hot Springs permanently the response I have received to the always asked “so what do you do for a living” question has been overwhelmingly positive. Here are just a few examples…
- In March I came up to have carpet installed so it would be done when we moved in. I gave the installer and his helper some copper TSP coins and my card. He went off on a tangent about over spending and how he was “getting prepared for tough times”. He then downloaded my show to his iPhone, turned off Laura Ingram on his radio and played my show while he installed my carpet. When he left he told me “this is what America needs to hear”.
- The man who owns the office I rent to do the show from is a prepper himself. As soon as he found out about my show he had his assistant call me for some recommendations on long term storage foods. He has 5 acres behind our offices here and starting in the spring he wants me to help him with advice on how we can get some food production out of it, of course I will be happy to.
- The same man had me come to one of his weekly get togethers. They are real estate agents and do a pot luck lunch once a week. These are people that sell high end housing in a gated community. When I said, “my show is about self reliance, self sufficiency and liberty and understanding that rights come with responsibilities including being responsible for yourself and your family”, the room actually erupted in applause which caught me off guard.
- I have been talking to local growers at the Farmer’s Market, every card I hand out is quickly responded to with something along the lines of “we are with you on this” or “it is about time someone told people the truth”.
- Yesterday we went to meet a couple that print T-Shirts for some special shirts I will be taking to the Denver Self Reliance Expo. They took one look at the graphic and said, “you are our kind of people”. This progressed to a talk about both growing and storing food. They both said “you will be getting a lot more listeners with the way things are going”. Of course we now have a new business relationship with like minded folks, so that rocks.
Personally I have to tell you this is NOT just the difference between small town and big city. Remember we have owned the property and been coming here since 2005. Prepping wasn’t so warmly embraced even in Hot Springs Arkansas just a few years ago, indeed I even found that many people I met during our final year in Arlington became TSP listeners and really like what we are doing in the TSP community.
What’s really going on here is America has begun to waken up from its long slumber, a slumber that goes back to post war America. We built highways, two wars we didn’t call wars were fought with little sacrifice by anyone except those who went or sent loved ones. The cold war went on but people got numb to it. “Guns and Butter” were promised and for many seemed to be delivered. The 80s taught us that “me first” was cool, the 90s brought amazing technological advances convincing us that anything we dreamed of could be created and sold to us with a low interest rate. Credit began its massive rise in the civilian population in the 1950s and never stopped, well, until now.
2008 was a wake up call but many still just pretended it didn’t matter but after 3 years of misery and recent city bankruptcies, stock plunges and a unemployment rate with no improvements, people are beginning to question things when their overlords say, “nothing to see here, go back and keep shopping”. Countless Americans have had sit down sessions with their spouses, examined debt and put their hands in their faces. They then cursed their own stupidity stood up in righteous anger and said, “no more”,and have begun the work of paying off that debt.
Millions of young people have been sold a bill of goods that “everyone should go to college” only to find themselves with a lifetime of inescapable debt and no real job prospects. At the same time many employed in a “safe job” including plenty in “safe” government jobs found themselves on the streets with their best years now behind them. These people are now competing with high energy 20 somethings where there are 50 applicants for one job. And for that matter a job that isn’t that great to begin with.
I could go on, there are countless examples of the shock that it took to wake people up. Some were almost awakened by the above but it took Fukushima, Birmingham and Joplin to bring them the last mile to Wakeupsville. They key is a major segment of the population has looked at facts like our 61 Trillion dollar hole in our future budget and the riots in London. They have figured out that living for the moment has a down side, they realize many of our leaders are either malicious and/or incompetent. They also know changing things with elections is almost impossible right now, republicans and democrats alike spend like drunk sailors and don’t want to take responsibility for anything.
So these people come to a realization, the only thing we can do at this point is take responsibility for our own futures. We don’t know what is going to happen, odds are it may not be the “end of the world” but there will be a lot of hardships as a society that has been on a 50 year drinking binge experiences the largest hangover in the planet’s history. So these folks have “sobered up”, they are cleaning up the mess, at least the part of the mess they made. They are putting some distance between themselves and the drunks who are still partying.
Now understand the drunks in this analogy are…
- Most Americans from the wealthy to the “poor” who have plasma TVs
- Every major corporation doing business based on the old paradigm
- Every government agency as they feed on taxes and are ripe with waste
- Every single main stream politician
- The elite banking layer, the biggest banks, the Fed, etc.
Get it? Most everyone is in on this party, they also know it cannot go on forever, but they all think, one more year, one more decade, etc. We can keep it going like a drug and alcohol induced frenzy. Feeling tired dude, here is some coke (another credit card), how about some ecstasy (quantitative easing), etc.
Now let me ask you have you ever been to a big party. May be not a drug filled mayhem like the above example but just a lot of drinking and carrying on? Tell me than, what happens when a person or two notices it is 3 AM and tries to start shutting it down and cleaning up a bit? Are they embraced or told to “relax and just have fun”. So it is as a major portion of us have awaken, those still slamming the Jack Daniels have no desire for us to harsh their buzz with any of that monotonous reality. It isn’t just that they don’t want to stop they don’t want us to stop either. When the cops show up to bust the party they want plenty of company in the holding cell.
Friends, this is what is really going on, this is why we are painted as extremists, compared to terrorists and generally looked down upon. We are a threat, not a threat in the way we are painted. We threaten the establishment that if enough people think like we do the party will end. Of course the reality is the party is going to end, they always do. The hangover will come, it always does. Change is coming, we are on the right side of it and those who want to continue “business as usual” have decided we are a threat.
We can see there is nothing new here, in the 1800′s a German philosopher named, Arthur Schopenhauer stated,
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Well the violent opposition occurs only when the truth has entered a phase of acceptance by a block of people that are too large to marginalize. This is our current state, this is where we are in the grand hourglass of the nation’s history. Enough of us have awaken, we are now cleaning up at least our part of the mess, we are going through our own hangovers, we are getting ready for the big one when the party stops. We have collectively stated, “We are responsible for ourselves and our families and we will do our duty in that capacity”. Crazy as it may seem once you wake up, this is what all the animosity is all about.
The rest of the nation doesn’t want to hear this right now, they don’t want to accept that their mess is their fault, the politicians don’t want to admit that even their power ride is about to end and new blood will take over at some point. The corporations hate that a kid who can’t spell can build a business with facebook and twitter while no one gives a shit about their promotional crap in the social media space. The media hates that a hick like me has 25,000 listeners while their newspapers go broke and their ratings continue to free fall as people get more truth from YouTube today than the nightly news.
And so it is as we enter the “violent opposition” phase that we should feel encouraged, as it is stage two in a three stage process. Keep on prepping, keep on building community and keep on living that better life, if times get tough, or even if they don’t”
Jan Cline is a women who spent her life being very independent, she was a business owner who was doing well even during the recession. Then about a year ago she heard some of the worst words you can ever hear from a Doctor, “I’m sorry you have terminal cancer”.
