When Should You Start Preparing?
Even with all the gyrations of the stock market, most people in the United States do not think it is time yet to start preparing for a future emergency event. Things are bound to start looking up. It’ll all blow over.
Most visitors to this site don’t think it’s time, either. And this group is way ahead of the curve, because they’re at least reading about possibilities. But when it comes to actually starting to store things… well, it’s expensive, it’s a bother, things may not go that far downhill… there are a thousand reasons not to do it.
I recently came across the most eloquent reason for doing it now. It is impossible to argue with.
A friend sent me a post from a man who was living in Argentina in 2005, during that country’s economic meltdown. Embarrassingly, I must admit that I did not even know it happened, much less the astounding extent of its effects. But I do now. You can read the post here. I must warn you that it is very dark, very disturbing. But it is also a very real view of what it is like to live in a country that suddenly drops from 1st world to 3rd world status.
Some of the best parts are when he tells us what he wished he had done to prepare better before the emergency. Things like buying a bag of small gold rings, because buyers would give only ‘junk gold’ prices for everything, even solid gold coins, since they could not test the purity of it. And wishing mightily that he had stored more food, and especially more water. There are priceless pearls of wisdom in his writing.
He always did like guns, so part of his posts are about how necessary they are. You have to make up your own mind about that. I have very personal thinking on this subject, which probably does not translate for everyone. You may notice we do not have any links to firearms on this site. However, his recommendation for body armor does deserve some close attention.
Sounds like I’m talking about an active war zone, doesn’t it? Fact is, that’s very close to what it was, even though it is described in Wikipedia as the simply the Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002). The Wikipedia page has a nice graph showing that only about a third of the people of Argentine were under the official poverty level at the time he wrote his post. Doesn’t sound that bad, does it?
If you have someone who is trying to talk you out of preparing, even if it is your inner voice crooning ‘it can’t happen here’, please have them read this post.
I think it will change their minds before they are through reading it.
