Tal in 1998
My dropkick into reality didn´t come until my early thirty´s. The Y2K scare was just around the corner, and a lot of people were scared about what it could mean. Then one Sunday there was an unforgettable discussion in my church about the personal preparedness of the families in my congregation. A dear friend of mine was heading the discussion and started off with this comment: “I want you to think about this scenario. Al Gore is President because Clinton was impeached. Y2K wiped out all of the banking systems and government computers all over the world. The stability of our government and all social services are gone and people are beginning to group together for their own survival. What resources do we as a congregation have at home if this scenario happened tomorrow morning?” It was chilling. This was not some paranoid survivalist babble or some quote out of an apocalyptic novel. These were the exact same scenarios that the media were projecting for the turn of the millennium unless computer systems all over the world were updated to compensate for the error in programming thirty years earlier. At first we began to chuckle and create “what if” scenarios. However, the discussion quickly descended into a dispirited panic when we discovered our sheer lack of preparation. A few had water wells and a well stocked storeroom, but most were as ill-provisioned as I was. I then understood that without the ability to realistically survive for more than a month on my minimal supplies, I would eventually need to depend on others. Depend on others? Now that is unfair. Why would I expect others to support me and my family just because they had better foresight and a willingness to prepare for potential disaster? Why had I waited until a possible event was immanent to think about preparing for it? What kind of strategy is that for me and my family? From that moment on, emergency preparedness has been a daily strategy.
Living in a rural community northwest of Tucson, Arizona I discovered that there were many people that had achieved some degree of personal preparedness. These were mainly farmers and ranchers, people that enjoyed being away from town, people that had experienced devastating floods in the spring of 1983 and knew what it was to be stranded in your own home, cut off from the nearby town along with the resources they were accustomed to. The more I became acquainted with these people, the more I learned there were some basic necessities that you simply have to keep around. First of all, water. Whether it was a water-well fed storage tank or several 55-gallon drums kept in the barn, you had to have it. Water is the most basic of human needs. If you run out, you are dead. Another thing these farmers always had in abundance were basic bulk food items: wheat, corn, legumes, oatmeal etc. I even ran into folks outfitted with ham radios, two-way radios, generators, and extra tanks of fuel. These weren´t just used for farming; these items were looked at as absolute necessities in the event of an emergency. One friend explained to me that he had purchased his horse trailer not only for the obvious benefit of transporting livestock, but also because it could serve as a shelter if his family had to leave their house because of a natural disaster.