May 3rd, 2013 – Friday – Disasternecessities – Completion

May 3^rd, 2013 – Friday – Disasternecessities – Completion

Can your food storage ever be complete?  I was at a friend’s house the other day, and he gleefully pulled me downstairs into his basement and showed me the boxed stacks of #10 cans.  I recognized them as the Premium Year Supply I had sold him 5 or so years ago.   The boxes looked good, if a bit dusty.

Of course, I could have asked him a lot of questions, such as:  Where is the water?  If you have a wife and 4 kids, this Premium Supply isn’t going to last all of you a full year, so what is your plan?   Do you have fuel?  Do you have extra money in the bank?  Do you have emergency plans already written? Do you have First Aid material?

Of course… who is actually complete in their Food Storage?  Who has it all 100% taken care of?  I honestly don’t know anyone.  Who really has the full capability of surviving 365 days with their family in their home without food and water or power?  And if they really do need to survive that long, then something has gone drastically wrong in our culture, and the next question is: What do we do after the first year is up?

How prepared can we really ever be?  Speaking personally, I don’t know that we can outguess fate.  Life is almost always throwing something at us that hurts, unbalances, or surprises.  You simply can’t be prepared for everything.  It’s not possible. It’s the nature of the world. It’s the nature of our lives.

Our Food Storage plan will never be complete. 

That is just the way it is.  And while my friend had a full Premium Year supply of Food for his family, most of my friends don’t have that luxury.  They buy a few #10 cans here, a bucket of premade pouch meals there, as their time and budget allows.  A 72 Hour kit for each car, a few for the home, office.  They can survive three days of no electricity, water, and food. 

Right now we hear about the Wildfires in California, and we send out our prayers for those good people who have to get out.  This is the kind of disaster that life throws at you, and this is exactly where a 72 Hour kit is handy.  Having at least that much… is a really good idea.

It’s the best most of us can do.  And I wanted to say in this blog post, that I think that is okay.  If you look at the industry of Emergency Preppers you will see that it’s become a ‘movement’.  It’s huge. It has nice daily emails and blog posts. It has pictures.  It has celebrity endorsements.  It’s… a business.  And yet… 99% of my friends don’t have the money or time to invest in Emergency Disaster Survival Preparation at that level. 

I think we need to look at our incomplete emergency plan and do two things.   1.  Let it gently motivate us to become more prepared.  2.  Accept that it will never get fully completed.  This will allows us to begin to build our food storage up without the undo guilt of not having it complete.  We can enjoy the journey… so to speak.