Every Tuesday night, over one million viewers – including me – gather in front of televisions to watch the highest-rated series in the history of National Geographic Channel. Doomsday Preppers is a show that has quickly become a cultural phenomenon. Each hour-long episode examines the lives of multiple seemingly normal Americans who are actively making preparations for the end of society – and the world – as we know it, followed by expert analysis of the thoroughness of their planning.
I know there are readers, visitors, and contributors to the Brush Fire Forum who could themselves be featured in future episodes of Doomsday Preppers. Some of you have food storage, “bug out” bags, and bunkers in undisclosed locations. I am not here to ridicule you, and I am not qualified to critique your preps. Instead, I am here to confess my own incompetence in these matters and serve as the voice of those other Brush Fire regulars that currently share my low probability for survival in the case of disaster.
Please resist the urge to point out the irony of the guy from the “Cubicle Survival Guide” series switching gears and confessing his doomsday action plan is currently to panic and surrender to his neighbors. There is a world of difference between thriving in the jungle of office politics and surviving in the real world after a societal collapse. Like many of you, I am utterly unprepared for a wide range of possibilities. If our cable goes out for more than thirty minutes that qualifies as a crisis survival drill in our house.
Yes, I am the Doomsday Procrastinator. I am one of those people that watch the dedicated
In the coming weeks, I will recount my feeble past attempts at preparedness. I will ask the questions that many of us have, but are too embarrassed to ask. Hopefully, some of the better preppers among us will be kind enough to open up and share their tips, insights, and knowledge with us along the way. We will look at some of the common – and the amusingly uncommon – prepping practices that our research uncovers. Send me your questions, comments, or advice each week, and we will cover them all here.
Trust me, I have two small boys and their loving mother at home to look out for, but supporting them on a single income means I will not be investing six figures into a custom recreational vehicle capable of surviving World War 3 anytime soon. The advice we receive and pass along here will be practical and cost-effective for any budget. I hate to disappoint anyone reading from an abandoned missile silo (or having this article read to you over ham radio, perhaps), but the information to be found here will be geared toward beginning preppers and Doomsday Procrastinators like myself.
With any luck, the polar shift or economic collapse will hold off until we can complete this web series or at least learn enough from it to be better prepared when it comes. If not, I have already buried a paper copy of all the future installments in a lead container in my backyard. There is also a copy of the Bible in there, as well as a bottle of water and a portable DVD player with all the episodes of “The Walking Dead.” That should be enough to help any survivors rebuild the world and keep them entertained for a while.
