Are you prepared?
For those of you who are survivalists, homesteaders, or simply anyone who likes to be prepared, think of @Preppers as your community help desk for all things related to prepping. Think of it as your coach, cheerleader, and support group.
What I am not: This account is not run by a bot. I can't do automated upvotes, resteems, or comments, and I certainly can't do it at the speed of light.
What I am: I am a human on a mission. A mission to do my part to breathe more life into the prepping movement.
What I am offering to the community:
- Real comments. Not random bot comments, but real on-topic comments to your prepping posts.
- Resteems. I Resteem on-topic survival, preparedness and sustainableliving content. I will only resteeem content that I find of value to the prepping community. Obviously due to bandwidth, and to be a good neighbor, I can't resteem every good post that I find. So please don't feel down if I don't discover and resteem your awesome prepping post. Sooner or later I will find your content.
- Suggestions and directions. As a volunteer community help desk with a live person, I will offer tips, ideas, help and direction whenever I can. But it is impossible to be an expert in all things. If I don't have an answer, I'll attempt to direct you to someone who does. Also, as a human with a regular circadian rhythm and a life outside of the internet, I may not be able to answer every question. However, I'm not the only prepper on Steemit. Follow the preppers and homesteading tags. There are great people here who love to help others.
- Upvotes. I upvote good people, great comments, and interesting prepping related articles. I don't demand payment for my upvotes, but your donations are certainly helpful and will go a long way to supporting the prepping and homsteader communities on Steemit. If supply and demand should ever reach a point that I need to start charging for services, I will always set aside some time and effort to also provide charity in the form of free upvotes, resteems, and SBD to help new and struggling preppers to get their content seen. An inability to pay should not prevent a good writer from being seen. I'll work with the prepping and steemit community to help new minnows get noticed.
- Community organization. I will attempt to do whatever I can to help organize other preppers to upvote your great preparedness, survival, and homesteading content.
Who's behind @Preppers?
This account belongs to www.Preppers.org For verification and proof of authenticity of this account, I have added a few Steemit RSS feeds to preppers.org (scroll down the homepage). I plan to eventually organize several RSS feeds on that site to promote the survival, preparedness, and sustainable living communities on Steemit.
Websites that we own, or are associated with, are Preppers.org, Preppers.info, AmericanPreppersNetwork.com, AmericanPreppersNetwork.net, Prepperbroadcasting.com and many others. We have several email newsletters and social media pages. Our hope is to use our reach and influence to introduce as many people as we can to the steemit community.
A little history and background
I grew up on a farm in Central Oregon in the 80's and 90's where my grandparents taught me about homesteading (we simply called it farming), gardening, livestock, hunting, fishing, canning, etc... Back then, no one ever used the term “prepper”. To us, due to media spin, survivalists were anti-government people hiding out in the woods with guns. We didn't think of ourselves as “survivalists”. However, interestingly I spent much of my time in the woods and mountains with guns and was never keen or trusting of government. We did “survival things” and lived a pretty self-reliant lifestyle. My father recently wrote a book on land navigation and his life experiences. So I guess we really were “survivalists”. We just didn't identify as survivalists until the internet allowed us access to the truth.
It's funny how negative media spin on something as simple as a word can really effect the way people feel about things. Survivalists got a bad and undeserving rap in the 90's
Flash forward a couple of decades to 2008. If you all remember, this was the time that we were in the midst of the financial crises. This, along with my distrust of government influence over fiat currency, lies about the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack, a botched recovery of Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Iraq war got me interested in the survivalist moment online. This is when I became very active in the online survivalist community.
Early Beginnings of Preppers
In media, radio, and podcast interviews I've been mistakenly cited as coining the term “prepper”. This is not true. In my research I have found instances of the word “Preppers” being used randomly on old bulletin boards as far back as the late 90's. Back then it had been used a few times on these boards as a tongue-in-cheek word to describe people who prepare but weren't skilled “survivalists”, I had also found the word used a few times on James Rawles Survival Blog.
I've also been asked by people: “Are you that guy?” or something to the effect of starting the Preppers movement. Well, yes and no. I'm only one of "several guys and gals" who played a very influential role in the very beginning at bringing this little known word to the mainstream.
As I had been connecting and networking with various survival bloggers on Google's blogspot, I came across this silly word Preppers. More specifically it was Texas Preppers Network founded by a survivalist who goes by the name Riverwalker. (the site is still on blospot and unfortunately hasn't posted since 2014) This was the very first “Preppers Network”. At that time if you had googled the word “Preppers” you would have only found 4 or 5 websites using that word on the internet. The ones that I can recall were Texas Preppers Network, Utah Preppers, Kentucky Preppers and Suburban Preppers.
Silly words sometimes make a big impact. Think Google, Yahoo, Twitter.
Knowing that our global socio-economic instabilities that could any day explode, having an interest in survivalism, having knowledge in digital marketing, and recognizing a burgeoning demand for survivalists to connect with each other, I saw huge potential for the word “Preppers” to become known to the mainstream. This is when I contacted the owners of those websites and together we formed American Preppers Network.
Our goal was to create an online community of “Preppers” in every state who would blog and exchange information but without all the racism and negativity that the media had unfairly attached to Survivalists. With any movement you are going to get extremists. There's just no way around that. But our goal was to offer more “how-to” content, and to help people start their own decentralized communities of preppers. We wanted to do this while being accepting of anyone who wanted to learn, no matter their race, religion, or nationality. We wanted a survival movement for the mainstream. Prepping was going to be it.
How could the media possibly paint “Preppers” as bad people if all they are doing is teaching people how to survive disasters, and especially if anyone can be a prepper no matter their race? How could storing up food or having an evacuation plan be extremist? Even Ready.gov recommends having a 72 hour kit. THAT is prepping!
Don't underestimate the media and their spin. You can paint a pretty picture as much as you want, the media will still find a way to spin it their way or they won't show it at all. Sensationalism sells. Negative Sensationalism sells even better.
I wasn't concerned, I've always known that even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. The APN ranked #1 on Google and with bloggers in every state starting up their own meetup groups, it was only a matter of time until I knew we'd be contacted by reporters. So I waited...
The Rise of Preppers
In late 2009 I was contacted by Jessica Bennet from Newseek to do a story on Preppers. She wanted to see what the “average prepper” was like. Well, I don't know really because I've never polled preppers to see their homes and lifestyles. What does “average” mean anyway? So thinking about what the “Average American” would look like, my first guess was Lisa Bedford, The Survival Mom. Lisa was a self-proclaimed soccer mom. How more average can you get than a suburbanite mother? Lisa also contributed articles to the APN. So I told Jessica to contact Lisa, she'd be perfect for the interview.
Lisa agreed and this article would go on to catapult her into her newfound fame leading to dozens of subsequent media interviews, book deals, and even the pilot episode of Doomsday Preppers. Lisa still leads a normal life by the way. She's an amazing lady if you ever meet her, very down-to-earth and willing to teach others. I highly recommend her blog at TheSurvivalMom.com She's also founder of Preppers University.
Remember Cody Lundin? Now I don't know Cody personally, so I'm not sure how Jessica discovered him, maybe by searching survivalists in Arizona where the video for the Newsweek article was to be shot. Arizona would also be the location for the shooting of the Doomsday Preppers pilot episode two years later. Cody has a well known aboriginal survival school out in Prescott, AZ. The Newsweek article would also lead to reality TV shows for him as well. In fact many bloggers and survivalists became instant sensations because of the various news articles that came out. Preppers became an instant 1849 Gold rush for anyone with an interest in the movement (See the Google Trends chart below)
(Google Trends Report for "Preppers" 2004 - present)
This was when things really began to take off. When you make it into media, I think you must get put on some sort of list. Because for quite some time, nearly every day we were getting media requests and then soon the reality show casting calls. Doomsday Preppers was the first big one. We were contacted by the producers of the show to do a casting call. I obliged. I put out the word to our community and even encouraged Lisa to do it. I'm sure she hates me for it now, because as you may already know, many things on those shows are “staged” and things are often taken out of context. She wasn't amused with how it turned out. Well, as I mentioned before, bad publicity is better than no publicity.
You can watch the pilot episode here
Doomsday Preppers and other Survival Reality TV shows became the norm and this trend continued for several years.
Downward trend
It wasn't until recently over the last couple of years that things have slowed down, and even more so after the elections. It seems when the economy does well, people start forgetting to prepare. I have news, EVERY TIME is the time to prepare. Normalcy bias is the biggest killer in disaster. When you are earning a good income, that is the best time to store away and stock up.
While the political pendulum swings back and forth, It's good to see people on the left preparing again (The left had their last big moment back in the permaculture movements of the 70's....Welcome back!). But those on the right shouldn't be slacking either. We still have major potential disasters on the horizon, and we always will. Nuclear war is becoming increasingly likely, and could soon be as eminent as it was in the 60s. Fiat currencies will always be unstable and untrustworthy. Debt is still skyrocketing. Terrorism is increasing. Population continues to grow. And a giant rock from space could still wipe out most of life on earth at any moment.
This normalcy bias needs to change. We need to bring prepping back and get people excited to learn again.
I believe that Steemit is the place to do it. I'm glad to have found this community.
The Butterfly Effect
I have listed these series of events to outline just one example of the butterfly effect and how a simple action can have a rippling effect through the fabric of time that can forever effect the future.
I encourage you to watch the movie Cloud Atlas. The movie is a prime example how such little things can have a big impact even centuries into the future.
I don't take credit for the Preppers movement, because one person alone cannot change the world. It takes everyone to get involved. And so many people, too many to possibly name, came together and provided a huge wealth of content to the movement. With or without the word preppers, people would still be doing this. Every day new blogs and video channels are starting up. Content is produced at an outstanding rate. New people are learning how to get prepared.
I had the fortunate opportunity to witness first hand the butterfly effect in action because I was able to watch this word ride the wave of influence through time over the past several years.
Preppers is just a word that rode this wave. Neither I, nor that word created the movement. The movement was already here. It just made it easier to identify and to see those waves.
Each of you have the opportunity to make huge changes to the future. Even if you don't have a word to gauge your influence, everything you do has a major impact on what happens in the future.
Every comment, every article , and every upvote you do, creates your own ripples in the sea of change that will eventually become the waves that will shape the shores of history forever.
As a blog currator, I've seen many preppers and bloggers give up because they don't get the comments, likes, or shares in the beginning that they expect. They get frustrated and quit. I've watched for years as blogs have come and gone never to return. Steemit is no different. There will be times that you get no comments and no upvotes at all. Don't let this discourage you. Do not guage your success based on the whales on the trending page. Focus on what you do and what you are good at.
Don't give up. Don't ever give up.
You have no idea the amount of influence each of you have. Make every word count.
I'll be here to upvote you.
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