Disaster Preparedness: Working Together

Three links for you today on how to plan for resilience outside your home or car. The more stable our workplaces, schools, and communities, the more secure we and ours are. These three links will help point you toward possible Winter projects aimed at improving the strength of the social environment you find yourself in. All links are, of course, highlighted from body text below.

The first link is to a good article from that fount of survivalist knowledge, James W Rawles SurvivalBlog.com. Not only is the site one of the best sources for solid information on best practices survival methodologies, it also has contests for writers on prepper subjects with nice prizes. This article covers how to prepare in the workplace and the school. Both places where our vast home stores will be unavailable come a disaster. There is good information for employers and employees both on how to make the workplace an oasis of safety and sustenance in disaster situations. The advice for school age kids is good, albeit focused on high school aged kids.

The second link is to a very good Italian site that deals with the "big picture" conceptual approaches to disaster mitigation and response. Not much in the way of lists for food storage and the like, a great deal in the way of rethinking our responses to disasters and their prevention. This site is worth a look every few months to get the mind moving in new directions in re: disaster preparedness. His latest post on the Haiti quake is thought provoking.

Third link is worth a look every month or so. It is a networking site for Montana bound, or considering moving to Big Sky, preppers. This site can allow us to encourage the "right people" to immigrate here to our great state. It is also another way to network.

We need more prepper types, and people of intelligence and good values, moving here and less of the NIMBY "aristocrats". Or big city families bringing the same amorality, personal isolation, and nanny state ideologies which spurred them to leave their dying rat warren cities for Montana's beauty and healthy culture in the first place.

I hate to sound like a Balkan villager here, but we do need to do our part to keep Montana's zeitgeist healthy. We need to diplomatically let the "aristocrats" know that they are ultimately humans, just like us, who need to cooperate with their new community, not just carry on as if they are boyars of Vlad Tepes' time. They need to realize that having been a yuppie in a cosmopolitan city, living the metaphorical life of a medieval noble, matters little in [their term] "flyover country" where the traditions are of neighborliness, self sufficiency, and faith.

We must help them realize that humans come in many forms, not just "aristocrats", darling "noble savages", and bubbas/peasants. Taking people as we find them is part of the Montana culture. If a person is a fool, we treat them one way. If a person can effectively engage with us in Life's quest, then we treat them another way.

We need to gently help the big city refugee family realize that their impatience with our pace of life and schools that do not tolerate aping of "keepin' it real" rejection of academics by their kids is not within our norms, our culture, the culture that they need to accept to integrate into our state.

Sure, we Montanans need to be flexible. But we must be true to our ideals. Trying to recreate California or Kosovo here is insane, but many of the immigrants try. We must reach out to these families and inform them through good example and caring instruction. Else, they will add to the problem come the collapse or other disaster.