I’ve been interested in this whole prepping thing for the past couple of years, and I noticed something: A lot of people seem to look down on it. The words “prepper” and “prepping” sometimes get negative reactions, and it got me wondering–why’s that?
It feels like some people see preppers as paranoid conspiracy theorists or just plain weird. But when you think about it, there are a ton of reasons to prep, like natural disasters (earthquakes, storms) or a bad economy. Prepping doesn’t necessarily equate to being a bunker-dwelling hermit, right?
What do you guys think? Why do you reckon “prepper” and “prepping” get a bad rap? Is it just how the media paints it, or is it something else? Any of you gotten weird looks or comments? How do you deal with it? And do you think folks are seeing preppers differently now with all the stuff going on in the world these days?
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If you’re preparing to save yourself, you’re preparing to abandon your community.
If you cant grow food, you’re not prepping, you just like guns. It’s okay to like guns. I like guns, they’re fun. But don’t wrap it up in this mad max fantasy of “I’m getting ready to protect my family in the end times” because what you’re getting ready to be is dead of an infection next to a pile of guns.
It’s because a lot of preppers are sovereign citizen, conspiracy theory, right wing nut bags. The idea of prepping got really popular right before the turn of the century and again in the run up to 2012. Obviously nothing happened and many of those people prepping for the end of the Mayan calendar or the 2000 apocalypse looked like certified lunatics. Definitely where a lot of the ridicule and stereotypes come from.
In reality, prepping takes many forms and covers a broad spectrum of ideologies. Lately, prepping has been rebranded, especially in leftist circles, as sustainable living or homesteading. In the general public, you’ll probably still get a lot of assumptions that a prepper is a Nazi with a bomb shelter and a million guns. And there are quite a few of those people, to be fair.
In practice, prepping should be more like community resilience, sharing resources, and making as much use as possible of any amount of space you have. Loading up your basement with ten years of MREs and cans of bullets is basically useless. A real prepper stores enough to get through the worst of an emergency but has a plan for continued life in the event the economy completely collapses or something like that.
For example, my wife and I are members of a local farm co-op and have hydroponic gardens in half the corners in almost every room of our house. We have chickens, and our entire front plot of yard is loaded right now with squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more. We give away or trade what we can’t consume ourselves. And believe it or not we live just outside of the center of a small town and have neighbors all alongside and behind. I also own guns, and keep a store of a few months worth of shelf stable goods and have a solid selection of tools. It’s not set up right now, but I have solar power if I need it and the ability to get rain water collection going.
I don’t refer to myself as a prepper because that’s not the primary goal of what we are doing, it just so happens to be a bonus of the marriage between community engagement and self-reliance.
If you want to play a fun game, go on youtube and start searching for basic self-sufficiency stuff. Watch a couple videos about canning food, gardening, first aid, composting, things like that. Then let youtube autoplay and see how long before you end up on a video that uses the phrase “white genocide” unironically.
Oh man, no joke. When we first were trying to figure out chickens that’s exactly what happened. Went from learning how to keep foxes and racoons out of the coop to gold and crypto are going to be the only currency stopping the new world order and the leftists want you to eat bugs so here’s how to make beef jerky at home.
Up here in the PNW, there are a lot of Christian nationalist/neo-Nazis in the prepping scene. Back in the day the Aryan Nations used to get a decent amount of new recruits by doing lots of prepping workshops.
I’d be a bit more into it if it wasn’t for that. It’s always good to be prepared for a disaster.
It’s probably a connection to the “survivalist” mentality, which is commonly seen as “buy countless guns, live in the woods, kill anything that gets too close.” Survivalists got a bad rap back in the 90s, and it has stuck around. Of course, there have been a number of groups since then that haven’t helped the image. Think Ammon Bundy and the Montana Freeman who were actually just a bunch of Sov Cits.
Over the top TV shows have not helped either.
