So, the thing that’s been unsettling me lately is that it’s not just us progressive, slow-food, Peak Oil/ global warming believers who are defining the concepts behind local food resilience. It’s not even mainly us, perhaps. I’d fallen into the trap of viewing the world through my local filter, and my particular neighborhood is full of people who grow and preserve their own food because of a belief that (put simplistically) America is moving past its era of unlimited greed and petroleum; a belief that Americans will have to learn to make do with something closer to our fair share of global resources.
Community means more to us than security, and if we were to define security it might be tied to a world with fewer weapons and more trust. All of these statements are rather general, but on this island we’re a mongrel crew and it’s risky to attempt to articulate commonalities. Still, though, I think I’ve come close. Most of us vote, and our election results tend to lean Democratic by about 90%. Our small county is the most liberal county in western Washington, which is one of the most liberal regions in the nation.
My awakening started when I read an article on canning, of all things. How unpolitical can you get, right? The article was reprinted on a vanilla off-grid website, but they had picked it up (with permission) from its source website: American Preppers Network. I disagreed with some of the canning advice in the article — which is material for a whole other rant — but when I saw the eagle and the flag on the Preppers Network website, I got curious about them.
So I read some of their forum posts. There is certainly factual information there, on matters such as livestock and gardens, canning and dehydrating, all entirely indistinguishable from thousands of practical conversations here on the island.
But delving more deeply into their forums brought up more and more divergent threads… For instance, stocking up on ammo is apparently considered as important as stocking up on food. And about that food: Most of the posts I read were about how Walmart had a fantastic sale on days-old store-brand ground beef, (so the writer canned many quarts of meatloaf…), or about how there was this amazing coupon sale on Betty Crocker stuffing mix. Or someone bought ten lbs of some store brand of prepared cheese slices, and put them in her freezer. Walmart seems to be the grocer of choice, and apparently it’s possible to buy terrifying quantities of meat from them which is near its pulldate, or cartloads of processed packaged food mixes, and store food away for mere pennies to feed your family once Armageddon hits.
And, they spend a lot of time focused on guns and door locks, in preparation for the time when the starving masses will come and try to break down their doors to steal the canned meatloaves. The violence of their rhetoric is noteworthy.
Here is a representative post from their forum:
“But I don’t see any way short of gunfire making any difference to this regime. Electing new officials won’t do it- they’ll be swallowed up as readily as the current crop. They’ve proven that time after time regardless what they say on the stump. We’ve got to remove the talking heads in the MSM and the communist leaders in this country.
Maybe when they start wondering if they’ll make it home after their work-shift they’ll start doing the right thing, but I doubt it. Those people feed on carrion….God, guns and Courage made America free- let us not disappoint our Fathers”
And, the approving forum administrator had the final word in that thread:
“I don’t think anything short of another American Civil War will stop the insanity being spewed from our federal government. Obama and his lackies are hell bent on usurping our freedoms and creating a NWO controlled by the banksters and corporate bigheads.”
So, these are the people who are online teaching people how to do canning. How do we respond? I wrote what I felt was a reasonably courteous comment to Off-Grid.net, pointing out that the source of their canning article disturbed me, and they censored out my comment. It never appeared. What next?
When the going gets weird…
Community means more to us than security, and if we were to define security it might be tied to a world with fewer weapons and more trust. All of these statements are rather general, but on this island we’re a mongrel crew and it’s risky to attempt to articulate commonalities. Still, though, I think I’ve come close. Most of us vote, and our election results tend to lean Democratic by about 90%. Our small county is the most liberal county in western Washington, which is one of the most liberal regions in the nation.
My awakening started when I read an article on canning, of all things. How unpolitical can you get, right? The article was reprinted on a vanilla off-grid website, but they had picked it up (with permission) from its source website: American Preppers Network. I disagreed with some of the canning advice in the article — which is material for a whole other rant — but when I saw the eagle and the flag on the Preppers Network website, I got curious about them.
So I read some of their forum posts. There is certainly factual information there, on matters such as livestock and gardens, canning and dehydrating, all entirely indistinguishable from thousands of practical conversations here on the island.
But delving more deeply into their forums brought up more and more divergent threads… For instance, stocking up on ammo is apparently considered as important as stocking up on food. And about that food: Most of the posts I read were about how Walmart had a fantastic sale on days-old store-brand ground beef, (so the writer canned many quarts of meatloaf…), or about how there was this amazing coupon sale on Betty Crocker stuffing mix. Or someone bought ten lbs of some store brand of prepared cheese slices, and put them in her freezer. Walmart seems to be the grocer of choice, and apparently it’s possible to buy terrifying quantities of meat from them which is near its pulldate, or cartloads of processed packaged food mixes, and store food away for mere pennies to feed your family once Armageddon hits.
And, they spend a lot of time focused on guns and door locks, in preparation for the time when the starving masses will come and try to break down their doors to steal the canned meatloaves. The violence of their rhetoric is noteworthy.
Here is a representative post from their forum:
“But I don’t see any way short of gunfire making any difference to this regime. Electing new officials won’t do it- they’ll be swallowed up as readily as the current crop. They’ve proven that time after time regardless what they say on the stump. We’ve got to remove the talking heads in the MSM and the communist leaders in this country.
Maybe when they start wondering if they’ll make it home after their work-shift they’ll start doing the right thing, but I doubt it. Those people feed on carrion….God, guns and Courage made America free- let us not disappoint our Fathers”
And, the approving forum administrator had the final word in that thread:
“I don’t think anything short of another American Civil War will stop the insanity being spewed from our federal government. Obama and his lackies are hell bent on usurping our freedoms and creating a NWO controlled by the banksters and corporate bigheads.”
So, these are the people who are online teaching people how to do canning. How do we respond? I wrote what I felt was a reasonably courteous comment to Off-Grid.net, pointing out that the source of their canning article disturbed me, and they censored out my comment. It never appeared. What next?