Having a Plan for When Shit Hits the Fan: A Journey in Prepping

When we talk about preparedness, everyone has their own disaster movie that plays in their mind. What’s the scenario in yours?

A natural disaster? Catastrophic power grid failure? A deadly, uncontrollable pandemic? A solar flare that zaps communication systems on a global scale? Food and water scarcity? Chemical warfare on American soil? Nukes? World War III? The right hunting the left? The poor uprising against the rich? Alien conquerors?

Or maybe it’s just a winter storm. We’ve experienced that – shivering under blankets, pipes bursting in our walls. When Texas’ electric grid failed in 2021, 4 million homes and businesses lost power and 246 people lost their lives – mostly from hypothermia. Two years later, another 174,000 homes in Travis County went black as ice-caked tree limbs took out power lines. Those events prompted Austin city officials to begin holding ongoing preparedness training classes for citizens like myself.

I am not prepared.

I’m resourceful, I’m crafty, I have a community that looks out for each other. I have beans and rice and bottles of water and a generator and a copy of The Foxfire Book that’ll teach me how to skin an animal and can vegetables. But I don’t have a bunker or a water filtration system or serious medical supplies. Most importantly, I don’t have a plan.

And I don’t know how much more prepared I became after attending a preparedness training class put on by the city of Austin’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in February – an excruciating series of PowerPoint presentations about how to make a disaster plan for your household, build an emergency kit, and stay informed about public safety events. It did inspire me to sign up for the Warn Central Texas alert system. I also received a free preparedness starter kit, containing an LED flashlight, emergency blanket, glow stick, hand warmers, ice scraper, and a weather alert radio – plus a water meter key to shut off my home’s water supply. It’s also big enough to double as a weapon.

At one point, attendees were asked to join their tablemates to play a networking game: loteria, but adapted to be about preparedness. In said game, I revealed that I had a generator and the guy sitting next to me – who was a FEMA staffer, but attending as a civilian – whispered: “I really don’t think you should tell your neighbors that.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

He shot me a grave look and said: “You don’t know what their intentions will be if they’re desperate.”

Even at a city event focused mostly on winter storms, I was seeing that it can be difficult to have conversations about preparedness without paranoia creeping in.

And in the ensuing weeks I’d spend exploring the culture of prepping in Texas, I’d learn it doesn’t look like one thing. There are optimists who view their community as a resource and pessimists who see them as competition, there are planners and gadgeters, doomsday believers and risk management realists – all with different fears, values, priorities, obsessions, and levels of perceived expertise on what the future holds.

Me? I just want to be reassured.

I have no illusions that existence on Planet Earth is safe, but I also don’t want to spend my life expecting the worst. So I don’t know what’s sicker: the anxiety of feeling unprepared or the anxiety of being certain that disaster awaits.

There’s just one thing I’m sure of at this point: You should have a generator. Otherwise, when shit hits the fan ... will your fan even be working?

The Man Who Wrote the Book(s) on Preparedness

This month, Texans can buy a variety of specified products tax-free as part of the Emergency Preparation Supplies Sales Tax Holiday, running April 27-29. One of the people instrumental in its addition into the state’s tax code in 2015 was Paul T. Martin. He’s an attorney, reinsurance industry lobbyist, and a longtime prepper who holds training events and consultations about emergency preparedness. Martin also authored multiple books on the topic, including 2015’s Pivot Points, which served as a call for the prepper community to reinvent itself into something more appealing to the average American.

I discovered the longtime Austinite through his prepper blog, which offers levelheaded discourse and practical information on crisis preparation. In a field of interest that’s rife with fearmongering, misinformation, and predictions driven by vivid imaginations, Martin seems like the guy calling balls and strikes. But what I admired most about his perspective was an emphasis on charity and volunteerism. To Paul T. Martin, being prepared for a crisis situation means one is ready to be an asset to their community.

To that end, he’s also published a free 59-page Ready Citizen Manual with action plans and recommendations about prepping in terms of food, water, cash, health and sanitation, energy, security, and communications.

Martin is glad Texans can take advantage of the sales tax holiday on emergency supplies, but wants to remind people: Don’t just buy stuff; know how to use it.

“I tell people you cannot gadget your way into preparedness,” he says. “They think, 'If I just buy things, throw them in my closet, I am prepared.’ That’s a very attractive solution on its face, but I will tell you: You can’t just have water filtration systems and power stations boxed up and never opened – not knowing if they work, not knowing how to use them – and be prepared. You don’t want to have to open the box and read the directions during a disaster, and there’s no guarantee that you are going to be with your supplies when the event happens. For me, that is a very realistic possibility because in my day job, I’m on the road a fair amount, covering 27 states. What happens if we have a major cyberattack or event of some sort and now Paul is 1,500 miles from home? That looks a lot different. Are Paul’s wife and kids sufficiently trained in the systems around the house? It’s really all about having a plan ... and then a Plan B and a Plan C.”

Martin is speaking to my greatest fear: that organization, details, and thoroughness – none of which are my strong suits – factor greatly into how prepared I will be in a crisis. That there are no supplies that will serve as a magic bullet. That I might even need to gather my loved ones for a ... gulp ... meeting.

Planning, he says, should be the focus of one’s prepping: binders, spreadsheets, aggressively maintaining your crisis vehicle, and so forth. There’s an adage he uses in his trainings: “If your preparedness efforts are boring – it probably means you’re doing it right.”

Interest in prepping hit Martin like a hurricane. A country boy from Tennessee, he moved to Miami in August 1992 to attend law school, but the day before classes were set to begin, Hurricane Andrew hit. His new apartment was without power for 17 days, there was chaos and destruction all around him, and he was pretty helpless to all of it.

“It was very traumatic, but it was a learning experience,” he says. “After that I said, 'I will never go through this again without being prepared – without having a plan, without having supplies, without having some knowledge of what to do and how to do it.’”

He saw a turning point in prepper-awareness a decade later with the September 11 attacks. To him, many events that have transpired thereafter – like Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Texas’ winter storms – have only clarified that the veneer of safety in our society is very thin.

“When you talk to your friends or colleagues, they’ll say 'They are saying’ or 'When are they gonna fix it?’ Well, who is 'they’? 'They’ are not coming to help you. 'They’ are not going to fix it in a timely manner that would be convenient for you,” he says. “It is imperative for your well-being and your family’s well-being to take some very basic steps. I’m not saying you have to become a doomsday prepper or build a bunker. Just have food and water and an ability to generate emergency power of some sort on a limited basis for a couple weeks. If we could all do that our lives would be dramatically improved.”

When I probe him about which potential emergency scenarios keep him up at night, Martin ranks civil war surprisingly low.

“Oftentimes civil war and civil unrest – rioting, civil commotion – are conflated,” he cautions. “I believe the risk of civil war is pretty minimal. People talk to me about it, but then when I ask them, 'Who are you going to shoot and why them?’ it always comes back to the nebulous 'they.’ Are you really gonna pick up a rifle and shoot your next-door neighbor because they have the wrong campaign sign in their front yard? Are you going to go after your kid’s schoolteacher because they have a bumper sticker on their car that Twitter has told you means they need to be shot? That’s not gonna happen. I talk to a lot of people about this and ask them how much training they’ve had with a firearm in the last five years? Often, zero. These are the people who are going to go out and effectuate a civil war? Come on – it’s a pretty far-fetched scenario.”

His biggest concern is a massive attack on our infrastructure.

“There’s countless grids: power, water, financial, pharmacy grids – all the critical systems we rely on,” he explains. “To me, that is potentially the most life-altering scenario. It is easy to do, you don’t need to be a state actor. It can be a physical attack on the systems or a cyberattack.”

Natural disasters are also a concern to Martin, especially in Texas. The climate becoming hotter and drier troubles him and so does building in places that are susceptible to flooding or wildfires. He’s also worried people are moving here at a higher rate than the state can build power and water systems to accommodate.

“When I see the response of community leaders and politicians, my reaction is that I need to be better prepared to be on my own in terms of feeding my family, hydrating my family, generating my own power, and helping my neighbors through the next crisis to the extent that I can,” he says. “Because I’m not real confident that the city of Austin is capable of navigating these issues. We claim to be a smart city, but we can’t run our water or power – we can’t execute the basics well. But when there’s another boil notice, I’m not going to get mad and go on Twitter. I’m going to put my head down and work on my preparedness.”

Gas Masks for the Whole Family ... Including Fluffy

It’s a warm spring morning in Cedar Park, and I’m strolling around a parking lot in a hazmat suit, protective gloves, bromobutyl rubber boots, and a military-grade respirator over my face. This is the first gas mask I’ve ever worn that didn’t have an acrylic bong attached to it, but with the CBRN filter in its place, I’m protected from chemical, biological, and nuclear contaminants. I was told the outfit ($263.99 for the gas mask, $79.99 for the filter, $139.99 for the suit) would be hot, but I’ve been wearing it in 75-degree weather for over 20 minutes while our photographer sets up a photo, and I’m surprisingly comfortable. I can now imagine myself donning this getup, which took about three minutes to suit up, as I evacuated my family from some localized poison-air event.

I’ve always been a little gas mask curious. They look awesome, they make you impervious to police tear gas, and wearing one could save my life if there were a toxic air scenario. So I’ve come to Texas’ largest commercial supplier of gas masks.

MIRA Safety, based in Williamson County, has an office that looks more like a corporate campus than a tactical gear warehouse: beautiful furniture, smart toilets, a nice video production facility, and an on-site spa being constructed for their workers. But one thing in particular struck me as CEO Roman Zrazhevskiy walked us through the facility: a 3-foot-tall mannequin wearing a radiation-proof MOPP suit and gas mask.

I mean, it looks like a really nice product, but ... is ... it ... ?

“Yes, we’re the only manufacturer of respiratory equipment for kids in the country,” he says proudly.

All I can think is: That mannequin is the exact size of my son.

“Think about it,” he says. “If something actually happens and you’re putting on a gas mask, are you going to be comfortable saying, 'Sorry Junior, we don’t have this for you.’ That’s a heartbreaking thing – I have two kids. If a cloud of gas is coming over us and I don’t have masks for them, I’m not putting mine on ... we’re all going to go, I guess.”

He notes that the suit, which is lined with activated carbon to act as a full-body filter, is really hot. So it’s for escape and evasion of chemicals in the air – not for hanging out.

“We’re all about creating products for underrepresented populations,” Zrazhevskiy notes. “Kids and pets.”

Yes, in fact, they sell a proprietary pet enclosure. It’s a square base with fake grass and a clear plastic dome over the top. You hook a battery-powered blower to its filter and it pipes clean air in so you can escape chemical pollutants with your pooch or kitty in tow – like a modern prepper version of Noah’s Ark.

Zrazhevskiy moved to Texas from his hometown of New York City in 2016 and started MIRA Safety a couple of years later. The company designs and sells gas masks, protective suits, body armor, Geiger counters, and tactical gear, but what makes them unique is marketing to civilians – who make up 70-80% of their eight-figure annual sales. The remaining share is military contracts, including Ukraine. They’re savvy with social media and invest heavily in search engine optimization, and they have a very memorable slogan: “Prepare today, survive tomorrow.”

“Our philosophy is anything we sell to the pros, we also provide to the average Joes,” Zrazhevskiy says as he shows us their bestselling CM-6M mask, which they sold 300 of to be used in the final scene of the Christopher Nolan film Tenet. “We don’t like the trend of gatekeeping with this kind of equipment.”

When I ask Zrazhevskiy why I would need a gas mask, I expect him to say World War III is coming, but he concedes that there’s never been a chemical weapon war on American soil and instead lists more practical scenarios: wildfires, earthquakes causing things that shouldn’t be burned to catch on fire and release chemicals into the air, tear gas, and industrial accidents – citing the train carrying 11 cars of hazardous material that derailed and burned in Ohio last February.

Zrazhevskiy says that the U.S. is MIRA Safety’s biggest customer base – Texas, Florida, and California specifically – but they sold a lot of gas masks to civilians in Hong Kong during the protests in 2019 before the Chinese government eventually blocked sales.

“Any government that doesn’t want you to have gas masks, you kind of have to question,” he shrugs. “Like, why not? They’re not guns or anything – it’s literally just protective equipment.”

A Bomb Shelter So Nice You’ll Use It During Peacetime

Of course, the ultimate piece of protective equipment a prepper can own is a bomb shelter.

The quintessential accessory of American paranoia, bomb shelters once seemed to me like a vestige of Cold War era delusion. Now – imagining having a trapdoor in my house that leads to an impenetrable space, safe from chemicals, bombs, and violence – fallout shelters aren’t looking so bad.

Ron Hubbard wants to build you the bomb shelter of your dreams: granite countertops, stainless steel microwaves, multiple bedrooms, tall ceilings, wine cellars, home theatres, and gun rooms. No underground luxury is impossible ... except, I suppose, windows. And, most importantly, these shelters will protect you from nuclear, biological, and chemical contaminants – with air-locking doors between each room, decontamination showers, and CBRN/NBC air filtration systems.

Having worked in steel fabrication since 1980, Hubbard founded Atlas Survival Shelters in 2011 on the premise of making bomb shelters that people would actually enjoy spending time in. Growth has been steady from the start and today his staff in Sulphur Springs, Texas, is working seven days a week to keep up with demand. According to Hubbard, they build about 100 large, custom bunkers a year; additionally, they sell roughly 400 prefabricated units and also supply parts – like gas-tight doors and air filtration systems – for several hundred more. The least expensive bunker that they install is about $30,000 turnkey, though Hubbard says the average price for one of their installs is $250,000. Commonly, he says, clients are having a bomb shelter installed at their ranch and then building a house or a barn on top of it.

“The bunkers are getting bigger, nicer, and more elaborate because people see the odds of using them higher,” he reasons.

The revolutionary angle for Atlas is “recreational value,” meaning that investing in a bomb shelter isn’t just going to save your family during an attack on America – it’s a piece of your property you can use during peacetime. But make no mistake: Hubbard expects war.

“That’s why I’ve been to 38 countries in the last year,” he explains. “I’m seeing the world right now because next week or next month there’s the possibility that you could never be able to travel again because we’re in a global conflict.”

Asked what likely disaster scenarios would necessitate a bomb shelter, he doesn’t hesitate.

“One would be civil unrest or a revolution in America because of politics. That’s not a matter of 'if,’ it’s just a matter of if it’s this year or next year. If Donald Trump doesn’t win and the Republicans feel that Joe Biden stole another election, it could start some kind of violent revolution,” he tells me over the phone.

“Two could be a global conflict. Three could be an airborne pandemic that would wipe out most people on Earth. The fourth one is a long shot, but it’s a polar shift or being hit by a meteor – basically like an Earth-ending catastrophe. But, currently, the main reasons people are buying bunkers right now is they fear a civil war or revolution in America that could lead to global conflict or World War III.”

Atlas Survival Shelters has a half-million subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Hubbard stars in most of the clips as an affable agent of Armageddon lodging and is clearly an expert in the field. Many of the videos showcase Atlas’ extravagant bunkers being constructed and installed into the earth with giant cranes. Others follow Hubbard as he gives fascinating tours of old shelters in Eastern Europe and Israel or billionaires’ bunkers in America. The feed also contains comparatively generic shelter content with AI voiceovers saying “Hello patriots” and “God bless America,” giving the impression that fallout shelters are a partisan interest – which Hubbard says they are.

“The political line has been drawn for people who buy bunkers. Democrats don’t buy bunkers, unless they’re very, very, very wealthy. Of my hundreds or thousands of customers, I have only two Democrat customers that I know of and they’re both related to Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg being one and somebody else related to the company,” he says. “Everyone else is conservative, Christian, gun-owning, Trump supporters. Democrats might buy tornado shelters, but they are not buying doomsday bunkers.”

I ask Hubbard if he’s claiming to have been involved in Zuckerberg’s bunker in Kauai, Hawaii, that’s been in the news this year. It would be a surprising admission given that a December Wired article stated that construction workers on the Meta CEO’s property have all signed strict NDAs and that employees on the project have been released for sharing photos to social media.

But Hubbard says he was involved, noting that it was actually built several years ago, despite the global media only reporting it recently.

“I didn’t actually build it,” he clarifies. “They called me to buy the bunker. I told them with the cost involved of shipping it to Hawaii, why don’t they pour it in concrete? It’s not all the media is making it. The bunker probably cost only $2 million. It’s not as big as people portray it. They’ve got the blast doors and all that stuff. They paid me to design the bunker and then they built it.”

Learning How to Stop the Bleeding

Even if I had a thorough disaster plan, and gas masks, AND a bomb shelter, I still wouldn’t feel made-in-the-shade. That’s because, from my experience, bad luck comes in threes, fours, and fives. So the question becomes: What else can go wrong during a disaster? And the worst-case scenario, to me, is sustaining a life-threatening injury with no access to emergency medical services.

I would like to know how to stop the bleeding.

And that’s a real concern because uncontrolled hemorrhaging is the leading cause of preventable death when it comes to traumatic injuries, according to the World Health Organization. One in five body trauma patient deaths could be prevented if someone present knew how to manage bleeding.

This is why Caleb Causey is advising me to buy a tourniquet.

Causey was a combat vet medic who did multiple tours in the Balkans before becoming a volunteer firefighter and an EMT and SWAT medic. Today he operates Lone Star Medics, which provides field and tactical medical training. His company offers 76 classes, which range from hyperspecific skills like performing surgery in the jungle to more generalized courses like Family Medical Readiness (You can see a full list of in-person and virtual events at LoneStarMedics.com). He also does in-home audits of people’s first aid resources and knowledge – often for people with interest in prepping.

Causey wishes the ceiling were higher on the amount of tax-free medical supplies you can purchase during next week’s holiday – it’s set at just $75 – but he’s still happy to share thoughts on what purchases could be a good start to your preparedness medical kit.

“Okay, say you’re an amateur lumberjack and you decided, during the winter storm, to chainsaw that tree limb that fell and you hack off half your leg,” he says. “What do you do until the ambulance gets there? You need a tourniquet, wound packing materials, maybe some hemostatic agent, and a serious pressure bandage ... the stuff you buy on aisle 3 ain’t gonna cut it.”

Prefabricated kits aren’t going to cut it either, he says. They have lots of filler and, often, substandard quality materials. So he advises assembling your supplies à la carte and shopping smart. That means N-E-V-E-R use Amazon or eBay for emergency medical supplies – there’s too much garbage out there. He recommends looking for products approved by the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care. So, to be prepared for your sawed-off leg, his shopping list would include:

- A proper tourniquet (he recommends a SOF tourniquet from Tactical Medical Solutions)

- Pressure bandages, like the OLAES Modular Bandage

- Wound packing material with a hemostatic agent (he recommends QuikClot Combat Gauze, 3 in. x 4 yds.)

- Chest seals for stab wounds or flying debris

Those things, he says, provide a good start for major trauma that will kill us quickly without medical attention.

When I ask Causey about essential medications for a prepper’s first aid kit, he advises simply looking into your medical cabinet, seeing what you use, and starting there. If there’s a medication you rely on, he recommends telling your doctor that you’re getting serious about preparedness and asking for an extra 30-day supply of your prescription. The other absolutely imperative medical kit item that can’t be overlooked is a very simple one: abundant clean water. When there’s a wound, it needs to be irrigated, and that can take up a lot of H2O.

As for a medicine-type item most people don’t think of? Caffeine pills, he says. They can help an injured person stay awake to be able to hike out of the field after an emergency.

So what about a first aid kit item that people think they need, but really they don’t?

“Ice packs,” he says, sighing. “They’re totally worthless.”

Should I Be Strapped for Disaster?

One recent night, with my head full of every disaster possibility, I lay in bed imagining gunshots outside. I thought to myself, maybe I should have a gun – for protection if there’s ever violent civil unrest or food scarcity and people are coming for my dried navy beans.

This is a line of thinking that Karl Rehn views as illogical. Rehn owns KR Training in Lincoln, 50 miles east of Austin, which is the largest and longest-running firearms training school in Central Texas. His list of weapons certifications is too long to read and he’s a grand master in five categories of competitive shooting. He’s also a prolific pianist and vocalist who plays 100-plus gigs a year, a master’s-degree-holding electrical engineer, and an active member of the preparedness community – where he says guns don’t factor in more or less than they should in your daily life.

“I start from the platform that carrying a gun with you on your person every time you leave the house is what a sane person does, particularly living in a city where police response is largely nonexistent at this point,” he tells me, referring to Austin, where he lived for many years.

“My idea is that it’s not a special emergency preparedness thing to own a gun and be capable of using it appropriately, which is a small number of situations,” he continues. “It’s like a parachute. You don’t need it until you really need it, but if you need it and don’t have one, the outcome is usually bad.”

To Rehn, who hosts emergency preparedness classes at his facility, it’s more important to have a plan, food, clean water, first aid supplies, and a way to generate power than a gun in the event of such an emergency. That reasoning comes down to what he factors as likely disaster scenarios.

“Texas has a long and deep history of floods, droughts, ice storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The apocalypse scenario where there’s people outside trying to break down my door to get in – that hasn’t happened so much,” he says. “If you look at it from a levelheaded standpoint, the thing that’s more likely to happen is emergency services will be overwhelmed, overstressed, underequipped and understaffed, or logistically unable to respond, which absolutely happens every time. So that’s where all the elements of this come together. If you’re not prepared to take care of your own emergency services until they can arrive – you’re not prepared.”

Point taken, but I’m still interested in the potential role of firearms in disaster scenarios, so I pose the question: What’s the first step he’d recommend to someone who wants to be prepared with a firearm?

“The number one thing that they could or should do is get training on how to draw from concealment, carry a gun concealed on their body, and how to access that gun quickly,” he explains. “Then, after they do that, they should stop leaving loaded guns in cars for criminals to steal. Texas has had over 25,000 guns stolen from cars in the last three years. Having an unsecured gun in a vehicle is a harm to the community. Anyway, this false idea that you’re going to have time to run back to your vehicle when you find out you need a gun – it generally just doesn’t often work out that way.”

Rehn knows this isn’t a popular stance throughout the gun community – some of whom advocate for “truck guns.” He understands that fellow conservatives might also take umbrage with his stance on open carry. He’s not a fan of parading around with a gun; he’d prefer that it’s a surprise in the rare instance that you may need to pull it out.

“It’s also more polite to not bother people as much,” he adds.

When I ask him what kind of rifle he recommends for someone who wants to be prepared to shoot game in nature in the event of food scarcity, he prefaces his answer with “Well, now the liberals will be mad at me ...

“The AR-15 is the best fun for that. It’s widely available, it’s easy to shoot,” he offers. “You put a red dot sight on it and you can teach anyone – you don’t need to be a big, strong man to muscle it around like a 12-gauge shotgun. The learning curve to practical proficiency with an AR is pretty short.”

That being said, he believes a concealed pistol is a better gun to have with you than a semi-auto rifle.

“If you’re in an active shooter situation and you are running around with a long gun, it makes you look like the active shooter, unlike a private citizen with a handgun.”

Rehn is a gun guy; it’s a huge part of his professional and personal life, but he’s not the caricature of the American gun guy – his truck isn’t covered in Second Amendment stickers or assault rifle decals. His training school is inclusive: There are female instructors and instructors with disabilities. It’s meant to be a comfortable place where people can gain professional knowledge and experience. In the same sense, he says preppers aren’t all like the ex-military, tattooed-up guys you see on YouTube talking about shooting people.

“The preparedness community that you think exists ... that’s not the preparedness community – that’s the online people,” he says. “The real preparedness people, the people who’ve been coming for a decade to the seminars that Paul [T. Martin] and I put on, they’re quietly prepared and they know their community. They’re not worried about apocalypse, zombies, urban riots, because you know what prepared people do in that situation? They don’t go downtown. They don’t march in protests. They stay away from large, dense urban areas full of angry, crazy people because they’ve thought through the risk analysis. The really smart armed people don’t do that either. They stay away from all that and they’re home with food and water and medical supplies.”

Not Just Nutjobs

Paul T. Martin has come to the conclusion that this is his assignment in life: to help others be prepared for emergencies and disasters, to present the information in a way that’s professional and intellectually honest, to be a resource to people.

I ask him if he thinks it’s mentally unhealthy to think about disaster scenarios every day.

“I can’t turn it off – think about what I call the 'what-if game.’ I’ve tried. I’d probably have more free time. And I would be more vulnerable,” he says.

“I talk to people who are interested in becoming preparedness advocates and starting their own blog and becoming consultants and things like that. What I tell them is: I assure you it can be a really dark place mentally. When I feel myself getting into that dark place, I create tools and procedures and tools to pull myself out because it can be a vortex of doom and gloom.

“So, number one, if you feel you need the help of a mental health professional, get it. Number two, a lot of what you’re picking up, you’re getting from doomscrolling on social media. Just get off for two or three weeks and you’ll feel better. Social media is not reality, it’s just a useful tool.”

He devoted a whole chapter of his book on this subject, even interviewing psychologists. That chapter is titled “Nutjob.”

“You might have people in your family who are relying on you to be a functional member of society,” he continues. “So it’s not just about you feeling better about yourself, it’s about you being there for your loved ones. I think people in the preparedness community are doing it to help their family, but if you do it to such an extreme that other aspects of your family life are negatively impacted, at the end of the day it’s a net loss.”

But Martin says that people who thought he was a nutjob 10-20 years ago for his interest in prepping now seek his counsel on preparedness planning. That’s a testament to how much the stigma has changed.

“The prepper community that I see today is not middle-aged white guys wearing camouflage, munching on freeze-dried ice cream, waiting for the world to collapse so they can talk on their ham radios,” says Martin, himself a certified amateur radio operator. “They’re people who have seen what we’ve endured over the last 25 years – 9/11, pandemic, financial crisis – and are taking steps to hedge against those risks so they are less impacted moving forward.”

Martin says he first noticed a demographic shift in 2014 at a prepper fair in Arizona: African American families as vendors, women in yoga pants taste-testing food with their kids. He sees that same thing at his talks today: diverse crowds, LGBTQIA+ attendees, left-of-center friends.

“Preparedness is not about your sexual orientation or political beliefs or background,” he says. “We all need shelter, clean water, and power. This is something we can talk about irrespective of your politics, irrespective of what part of town you live in, irrespective of your worldview – we all need to be better prepared so when something bad happens we can better manage it. A benefit of preparedness is that it helps us find common ground on something and gives us an opportunity to share something we all have in common.”

To me, that commonality is wanting to feel safe. I think many Americans used to feel safe and we all want to get back to that – one way or another.

My comfort, my optimism, is that I believe in humanity. Perhaps that’s just a form of faith – because, certainly, it’s not a historically valid conclusion. Still, I suspect we’re the planet’s smartest species and, therefore, its best problem solvers. And I think big problems are solved by working together, so it makes sense when I see people helping each other in times of disaster.

And that’s the person I want to be in a disaster scenario: someone who can look a fellow human in the eyes and say, “How can I help you?” And though many of the points of prepping that have resonated with me follow themes of self-reliance and independence, they also have a direct correlation to being a resource to your friends, your community, your world.

I want to stop somebody’s bleeding. I want to have collected enough rainwater to share. I want to let you borrow my gas mask.

I understand, now more than ever, that I’m not prepared, but I’m prepared to be prepared. And that’s a good first step.

Emergency Preparation Supplies Sales Tax Holiday

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April 27-29, 2024

You can purchase certain emergency preparation supplies tax free during this statewide sales tax holiday. Examples of supplies that qualify for a tax exemption include: portable generators, hurricane shutters, axes, batteries, and first aid kits. Click here for more info.