By Becky Bennett
The wealthy and middle class are rethinking their investment strategies because of alarming market dips. Meanwhile, the working class reels with the body blow of inflation and its challenge to daily living. Never mind that GDP growth has set a record.
One month into 2022, fears of losing wealth or simply affording food and shelter add to the overall unease with the nation’s swelling anger and uncertainty, both economic and political. A Jan. 24 column in The Washington Post suggested we have the ingredients for a civil war, a prospect previously discussed only among historians and far-right militias.
If not civil war, what kind of upheavals should we be concerned about in 2022 and beyond? Groups dedicated to doomsday prepping (for rich and poor alike) offer the following shtf or “(stuff) hits the fan” scenarios.
The always-plausible include: financial crises, natural disasters, and long-term power outages. Some preppers ratchet those up in 2022 to: Coronavirus pandemic 3.0, Great Depression 2.0, political violence in the U.S., Russian and Chinese land grabs (necessitating a draft), Iran and/or North Korea triggering a crisis.
Prepping and survivalist websites brim with actionables. You’ll find lists of items to acquire tailored to liberal preppers, frugal preppers, elite survivalists, urban preppers, and rural preppers, among others. Companies selling supplies are cashing in—upselling by urging people to buy extra items for bartering after they’ve bought all their own supplies. They helpfully list items that “will be priceless after the collapse.” One site recommends stockpiling fish tank antibiotics to combat diseases (since doctors don’t write unneeded prescriptions).
Well-known right-wing commentators urge prepping and market products; even the government encourages preparing emergency plans and kits for weather disasters.
Prepping begins to sound less off the wall when you consider recent events, such as the disabling Virginia snowstorm or deadly Tennessee tornadoes. Plus, many people remember the Great Depression, nuclear fallout shelters and, more recently, Hurricane Katrina with its squalid arena and people hacking through their roofs with hatchets. Government reliability took a back seat to individual action.
Today the well-off are afraid of losing what they have—but in contrast, working class and rural people have worried since time immemorial about not being able to take care of themselves and their families.
Rural people have always prepped, though not in the sense of buying a private island, building an underground estate, or ordering truckloads of pricey freeze-dried meals:
- Being prepared is bred into our bones, from our country heritage and our days in the boy and girl scouts and 4H Club.
- Self-sufficiency is a core value (as January’s Pennsylvania Farm Show well illustrates).
- We’re anti-establishment (against both the government and the monied interests it represents, which aim to use us).
- We’ve been warned for decades by our religious leaders to watch out for signs of the end times.
- We’re used to struggling to maintain control on a day-to-day basis and trying to foresee and ward off disaster. We don’t relax because we know that well-being can vanish in the blink of an eye.
Our present crisis may be having to pay a few hundred dollars more a month for food and gas, a huge heating bill during a frigid winter, or the necessity of replacing an old car to keep a job, when used car prices are up 39% (according to Edmunds).
Further, the pandemic depleted what little we managed to set aside in recent years. So we assiduously shop sales, buy the cheapest food in bulk and preserve it, search out frugal recipes, repair or borrow items rather than buying new, rely on and share a helping hand with neighbors.
On occasion, we might shoot a not-strictly-legal deer, or neglect to report earnings from odd jobs or cleaning houses (which help keep us off welfare). We cut movie subscriptions and double up with neighbors for garbage collection. Still, some needed items are scarce, and services are scant or unreliable even if you can scrape together the money for them. So we “do for ourselves.”
Where we are at this moment in rural America, or where we’re headed, probably doesn’t (yet) qualify as a shtf scenario, WROL (life without rule of law) or the prepper’s Armageddon: TEOTWAWKI— a catastrophic event that destroys society’s institutions and norms, otherwise referred to as the end of the world as we know it. (You can look up how to pronounce it.)
But as far as we’re concerned: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and we won’t take it lying down.
Becky Bennett lives in south-central Pennsylvania and is a freelance writer and editor. She was editor of the Public Opinion newspaper in Chambersburg for 18 years and a journalist for 40. “Across the Divide” examines rural perspectives on issues facing Pennsylvania and the nation.
