As we head into another weekend I am burdened by the same thoughts I have had for years when confronted with the latest political news pouring out of the media. The President has just declared an executive order that will allow for up to 5 million illegal aliens to stay in our country. I won’t debate the legal issues with this proclamation. I won’t argue over the times other presidents have signed executive orders and I won’t blame one side of the political fence any more than another.
What I will say is that our country is doomed and this is just one more nail in the coffin. If you think I am completely wrong about that, you might as well stop reading right now. I say this is another nail because this single event isn’t what has driven our country to the edge of disaster. I won’t say the Democrats have ruined us because Republicans are just as much to blame for the problems with our society, but it is our nation that is in a free-fall regardless of who steered the ship. The time for blame is over as I believe getting all worked up in an argument over who caused this mess at this point is futile. In the words of Hillary Clinton, “What difference does it make?”. America is like a speeding locomotive that is on fire and someone has greased the tracks. Ahead in the distance; the bridge over the chasm is out and there is nothing we can do to stop it. We are going over the cliff.
Yes, I admit that sounds gloomy and defeatist. It sounds like I have given up, thrown in the towel and let someone beat all of us who aspire to freedom, self-responsibility, a limited government, privacy and common sense, in the arena of political ideas. You may be right, but that isn’t exactly how I look at it. On the other hand you may say that with all my talk of prepping, this admission proves that I am just waiting for the world to burn down so that I can have my moment of glory. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
‘What we need right now is to get out the vote’! you say or ‘we have to take back our local representatives’. Neither of those will matter and you will soon see that even though we have the ‘other side’ in power now the path this country is on will not alter. The speed of her demise will not slow, but only the people who are blamed will change.
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Benjamin Franklin
Economic Collapse
Todd Sepulveda who runs Prepperwebsite.com and also Ed that Matters, recently conducted a poll via Facebook where he posed several questions to preppers. You can read the results at his site which are both fascinating and not surprising to me. One of his questions was “What EMERGENCY is your biggest concern?” and the winner by a large margin was Economic Collapse.
I say the results were not surprising and fascinating at the same time because on one hand these are concerns that have been shouted from the mountain tops by hundreds of economists, investors, business men and women from all nations and even us lowly preppers for years. The fascinating part is that the people who are in power, who actually control the monetary purse strings say the exact opposite and unless you are listening to the prophets of doom, or prepper websites like ours and hundreds of others you won’t hear that message. It matters not what the people who governments are supposed to represent want, the experts in charge in almost every case make decisions to the contrary.
You don’t want to go Quadrillions in debt to give money to foreign banks? Tough crap! You don’t want us to raise your taxes to pay for programs you voted down? Racist! We know better than you. If you overwhelmingly oppose allowing millions of illegals to come into this country when we are already too far in debt to ever pay it and do not even have a strong enough economy to support the citizens here who want a job? Who gives a rip? We are going to do it anyway.
When the people in charge politically, stop listening to their constituents; you no longer have, and one could argue it has been this way for 20 years the Republic that our nation was founded as. We are powerless to the people we put in authority. Powerless to even remove them from office at this point in enough numbers that matter.
Ferguson Riots and Class/Race politics
And the next big event will be riots in Ferguson. I say this without even knowing what the verdict will be because there have been so many plans put in place to make this happen. I know that even if the verdict would be that the officer who shot Michael Brown were to be publicly executed, there would still be riots because that is what our society does. Win a sports championship, riot. Want to buy a TV on black Friday and they are all sold out, riot. Don’t like what happened to someone, riot.
Rioting does nothing more than destroy property and it is almost always never the property of the people who the rioters are supposedly upset with. Rioting as we have seen in the US anyway is pointless and frequently driven not by righteous anger, but by forces outside who have an agenda to see violence and mayhem rule. You have FBI agents who have been caught posing as rioters, infiltrating the riots not to calm people down, but to inflame the crowd and spur violence.
The Occupy Wall Street protests and pretty much any protest in modern times quickly devolves into violence once the masked, hoodie wearing thugs show up and start breaking things. Does this get the point of the protest across? Nope, it just destroys property and quickens an escalation by the authorities. I don’t believe for a second that all of this is organic and in Ferguson you already have reports of outside groups hoping to capitalize on the event. Do they have the interests of Michal Brown’s family in mind or are they simply seeking another opportunity for anarchy?
All of this type of behavior stems from a society that values nothing but chaos and thinks only of themselves. Our nation wasn’t founded on lawless behavior, but the people in our society at all levels have excused it for so long that it has become normal. I believe that one aspect of this is so that government can rationalize the need for a heavier military style presence to protect the public. This will invariably lead to martial law for everyone to keep the peace. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why there are already reports of high numbers of DHS vehicles pre-staged in Ferguson. That’s to keep everyone safe you say? Really. If it was to keep people safe, why did the person reporting them get fired? Why wouldn’t the DHS want it to be public that their efforts were to keep everyone safe?
No, I believe that this is yet another large scale exercise that is being used to practice martial law, detainment techniques and crowd control. What better place to test this out than a town on the verge of riots? And if that is the plan, you have to take that to its logical conclusion. If forces are practicing this now, there must be thoughts of needing this in the future. There is no putting the genie back in the jar.
What can you do?
You may be asking yourself why I am taking just these two seemingly unrelated items and using them as examples of our world going to hell in a hand basket. The economy has nothing to do with Ferguson and police forces should keep us safe, so how is any of this proof that our society is doing anything?
Yes, I could be making a case out of nothing. Actually, if I were to write everything down that was cause for concern I would have a list longer than this article already but there is no way to connect it all together in a way that you could take before a judge and prove anything. All of the individual events can be pushed aside as insignificant and unrelated by anyone, but like the survey Todd Sepulveda conducted, many people don’t need to be told we have a problem. Many people don’t need proof of impending doom, they know it in their bones.
Prepping has not become so popular in recent years due to natural events. There hasn’t been an increase in Hurricanes or any other normal weather phenomenon, but yet millions of people have begun to sense that something is wrong. You can take items like our economy, riots, bank closures, elections, supreme court rulings and all of that and argue away any of them as showing a trend that points to a bleak future. What you can’t do is remove that doubt from the minds of the people who are living in these times.
No matter what the wizards of smart say, preppers have enough evidence that society isn’t going along just fine. We know that the way we are living is unsustainable in a lot of measures. We don’t need anyone to tell us to prepare, instinctively we know we need to and that is what drives people to websites like this.
You are prepping for your own reasons. Maybe it is because you worry about an economic collapse. Perhaps you worry about riots in your town and the disruption that comes with them. Maybe it is something else completely but no matter what the reason you are prepping because you know that you will need to rely on yourself in the future. This isn’t because the government is telling you to. You do this because you can feel the urgency yourself.
I would urge you to listen to that voice.
It has been said that it is never too late to prepare, but that also goes against common sense. If you wait until the disaster is at your door, it is too late. If you wait until your children are starving it is too late. If you wait until the economy collapses, nobody has a job and people are rioting in the streets it could be too late.
I personally don’t believe that a political solution to our nation’s problems is possible at this point. There are too many people beholden to too many special interests that have too much money. I will still vote for the candidates I believe in, but I am not going to simply vote for a party because I believe they will do anything different than another party.
I am also not going to go riot or protest my government because that is the same as voting in terms of futility. We are at an odd place in history I believe where unfortunately we have to let the music play out and see what happens. I don’t believe we can fix anything now, but you can prepare. I also don’t believe that we need violent revolution. At least not at this time although I do believe that is in our potential future. It is the path we seem to be on and none of the traditional methods of averting this have worked. This could ultimately be our own fault but regardless, things need to change. The time isn’t now, but I do think it is inevitable.
Thomas Jefferson said: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I sadly agree with that statement. I say sadly because I am not foolish enough to believe that measures such as this aren’t without huge costs. Patriots would be more impacted than tyrants I believe, but our liberty is dying and at some point we will need to take care of it.