Photo by Bryan Rosengrant http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosengrant/
During one of this weekend’s #preppertalk chats, @FreedomPreppers coined a great term “Prepper Posse”. We were discussing how going it alone in some SHTF style future is probably not the best idea. But if you’re like most preppers, the idea of just telling everyone about your stuff & skills sends a chill down your spine.
So how do you make a Prepper Posse? You know you need others, but you also don’t want to expose yourself to unwanted attention. Now I may not be the best person to listen too here since I’m broadcasting on the internet that I’m interested in a self-sufficient prepper living, but I wasn’t always this way…it actually took a couple months for me to bring it up to my wife :)
I think it needs to go like this (at least this is basically what I did)
- Immediate Family…face it, you have to get them on board pretty close to the start!
- Extended Family…Here it can get a bit tricky, you want them on board, but if they’re not willing, you probably still have to see them all the time. Hopefully you know your siblings, parents, cousins well enough to have some idea their general attitudes toward the world. In my case I knew one of my cousins and my brother wouldn’t think I was crazy. But I was happily surprised to learn that my parents and others in the extended family were very open to the idea of getting better prepared. Of course it probably helped that a hurricane had recently forced some of them to evacuate, and that had gone rather poorly for most.
- Friends…ah the tough one. Who to tell? Clearly there are friends who have skills already that you would want around and then of course they’re your friends so you care about them and in general wouldn’t want to see harm come to them in a SHTF scenario. Again like your extended family I would hope you have a general idea of your friends’ attitudes. Here I would start off slow, bring up some gear perhaps that would be fine for a “normal” camping trip…if they get excited talking about the three of them they have and why the picked the type they did…bingo. That’s actually how I found out one of my daughter’s friend’s parents were preppers.
- Strangers…unless you count my recent blogging, I haven’t done this step yet. But I hope to do it next weekend. I was surfing around on one of those MeetUp sites and discovered there is a group of preppers meeting in my neighborhood next weekend. There are already 21 people signed up to go. Now I doubt you’d form a “true” Posse this way, but good to know other like-minded folks that live near you.
On a side note if you don’t know what #preppertalk is…you need to get on twitter and follow Survivor Jane right away. Of course you should follow us too, and these other great Prepper resources:
- US of course (@OrganizePrepper)
- Survivor Jane (@SurvivorJane)
- Freedom Preppers (@FreedomPreppers)
- Survival Impact Gear (@saleazon)
- Instinct Survivalist (@ISurvivalist)
- isurvivalskills (@isurvivalskills)
