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My Most Essential Prep

(Slightly edited from an original written for the excellent website survivalblog.com)

Blissful ignorance is not for us. We look at the folks buying tonight’s supper and no more at the grocery store, at those “stocking up” with two loaves of bread and a gallon of milk before a storm, with indulgence if we are kind, alarm if we are caring, or contempt if we are proud.

WE have a generator and a shed-full of cans of stabilized gas; WE have months worth of MRE’s, and #10 cans of wheat for a year (not quite sure how to cook it), heirloom seeds for that “forever” garden, TWO four-wheel drive vehicles, a closet full of rifles and …..how many thousand rounds of ammo?

How about spark plugs for the 4×4’s and the genny? How about a spare ECM or two…or condenser and ignition coil for that “EMP-proof” antique? And what if a ‘coon gets over the wire and past the hail of bullets (or were you sleeping?) and you get NO seed-corn from your first planting?

How much ammo will your wife and daughter be able to carry under fire to your foxhole, so you can keep the drug gang (or the UN) at bay, when the other guys (your fair-weather blood-brothers) in your fire team did not show up?

How long do you REALLY think it will take for things to get back to a comfortable “normal”, or even to a survivable year-1900 level, after the starving mobs and clueless do-it-yourselfers have burned and looted all the power plants, after the old farmers who knew how to get it done without air-conditioned tractors and Round-Up have been killed for their stored salt and cow feed, or after China has come, with blue helmets on, and started clearing out us round-eyes to make way for their Master Race?

We both know we are tough, and savvy…but we both know, if we are honest, that it is not really enough, not near enough, if the bottom really drops out, as very well it could.

Some of us look at the lone-wolf prepper, fondly described above, with the same feelings that he has for the last-minute milk buyer. We made the hard decision, and made our “bug-out” location our full-time home. Not only do we have productive gardens, livestock, off-grid power, etc., etc., but we have a community. We have a radio guy, a blacksmith, a farmer, a couple of retired Special Forces veterans, and more, an established, operating, pretty darn self-sufficient community right here around us.

Do you have an iron mine to feed the blacksmith? Do you have a pharmaceutical plant to make the ivermectin, when you have exhausted all the herbs you know about, and your cow or your child is still sick? Okay, your junk–pile is big enough that the blacksmith will never run out of material, but how about high-speed tool bits to keep the lathe making chips? Or a vee-belt to drive it?

I write this as a mechanical engineer with decades of experience, a prepper from my teens, a man who has obsessed about, and studied radical self-sufficiency for most of my life. It is a target that recedes as you approach, an unrealizable dream for one man, for a dozen, for a hundred. Daniel Boone did not make his own rifle, or gunpowder, or knife; probably did not dig his own flints. Our long-term survival as humans, let alone any degree of civilization, has depended for thousands of years on networks near and far of peaceful trade, skilled specialization, and communications.

There is one essential prep that I have not mentioned. You could call it, “the Constitution”. “Wait”, you may say, “what the hell does that sad rag have to do with SURVIVING?”?

It is the Rule of Law, in America undergirded by our Constitution, that has made our comfortable prosperity possible, the prosperity that has allowed us to buy all that ammo and all those MRE’s. It has allowed continent-wide cooperation, without much tyranny, to provide the roads, the power plants, the trains carrying all that wheat, the materials, the medicines, not to mention the courts that keep most folks on their own property and out of yours.

YES, the “system” is badly bent, deeply corrupted by human evil, a party-pad for career criminals. But as bad as it is, it is keeping lots of folks that we love (who are not as tough as we are) ALIVE, and if we are honest, probably us as well. And, though it is bent almost beyond recognition, I am here to tell you it is not past fixing. All the “tools”, “parts” and “instructions” are already to hand, in our founding documents. A small but growing group of patriotic Americans has put together the tutorial on how to get it done. We CAN get our Republic back, get our freedoms back, get honest money back, get accountability back, if just a few of us stand up, and work together.

TACTICAL CIVICS™ is the name for the plan, and for the organization that began to articulate it. TC is a connected series of lawful, peaceable, workable plans that begins with securing your own community against criminal exercises of lawless power a well as against ordinary disasters; goes on to turn Congress from a corrupt House of Lords working for the globalists, to our hometown servants getting our minimal business of national cooperation done; to actually make all government employees as accountable to the Law as you and I are; to bring just and sure enforcement of our good laws and borders into the hands of the good people; and to reverse a century and a half of stolen rights and elite parasitism. “America-Free” (america-free@mn.co) is a newer network that is further advancing the mission with less organizational baggage.

We may well need those beans, bullets, and band-aids. No responsible person should be without them. But no responsible person can really believe that they are enough. Not only Daniel Boone but Davy Crockett traded, across hundreds of miles, with a network of people, for lead, powder, the gun, the knife, the flint, fish-hooks, and maybe somebody he loved one day needed a doctor.

Even this much of free peaceful social cooperation is quite seriously at risk today.

The best, the most essential prep is to try to keep our Rule-of-Law going. More than that; to restore the Republic that inspired the world, that was explicitly established to secure the rights of The People; get the criminals out of the driver’s seat, and get our glorious America back again. Invest half an hour to read about Tactical Civics, on their web-site or on this one. Join America-Free, or TC, or work with me, to begin the process in your own home-town.

Save your family, and maybe even yourself.

By John Leyzorek