"When you hear the word 'survivalist', what image comes to mind?
Perhaps you think of a gun-toting loner in Mid-West America, who lives in a shack surrounded by tinned food and emergency water supplies."
This question is posed by an article from BBC news today.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7379741.stm
Many folks around here are discussing various scenarios given the state of our precarious economy, the high cost of fuel and the massive debts incurred due to two occupations being put on the nation’s credit cards.
Yesterday I heard Joyce Marcel on WKVT say that folks should "buy guns" and that "it's gonna be like Mad Max". She clarified that she didn't necessarily think that the situation in Brattleboro would be as drastic as in various cities and other places where a sense of community has largely been eradicated. She said that our population has a huge sense of entitlement and they will go berserk if they don’t have their “88 channels and 16 kinds of shampoo”.
Our infrastructure is crumbling, our political system is dysfunctional or depending on your perspective, perhaps non-functional, there is ongoing concern and widespread apathy about, climate change, massive species extinctions and resource wars as clean water becomes ever more scarce.
We are already observing food riots in half a dozen countries and the Middle Classes of China and India are consuming ever greater amounts of oil, meat, rice and other items that are in increasingly short supply. Disease is also an issue and there are random factors such as the potential for earthquakes or extreme weather as well as the relatively small, but not totally insignificant impact of terrorism or weapons lifted from the unsecured former Soviet Republics. Many argue that the U.S. has made great strides in destabilizing the Middle East.
Short term thinking is responsible for many of these things and perhaps in response some people are trying to think about the long term in the hope that they can better cope with the challenges that might come next.
My point is not to convince anyone that the sky is falling, but to pose the question of whether it is appropriate to be prepared for disasters even as we hope the worst case scenarios never come to pass.
Now back to the article from the BBC....
But today there is a new breed of survivalist – and they're well-heeled, well-educated and more likely to wear an immaculately pressed suit than a camouflage flak jacket.
Barton M Biggs is about as far as you can get from the old John Rambo-style survivalist. Forget long, unkempt hair and a sweat-stained vest. Mr Biggs is a former chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley, who now runs the hedge fund Traxis Partners in New York.
Yet in his latest book, Wealth, War and Wisdom, he suggests that all right-minded people should "assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilised infrastructure".
Man in mask in a bunker
Many bunkers were decommissioned after the Cold War
"The four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out every two generations, and they come in different disguises," he says. "We are due to see the horsemen again some time in the next 10 to 20 years – and the prudent person with wealth should take out an insurance policy against them."
The four horsemen in this instance could be any one of a plethora of threats.
see the rest (And some snazzy bunker designs) at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7379741.stm