Doom scrolling and constant “BREAKING” tweets about all the ways in which are all going to die today can lead to fatigue. Fatigue leads to complacency. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf…We’ve all heard all the reasons that the world is ending today, so we get complacent. We get tired of checking our gear bags or strapping on a pistol and decide to leave home without it, just this one time. That day, things happened and we needed our gear, but our complacency born out of fatigue, put us in a bad spot.
A big part of why we do the Future Conflict podcast is to try and dispel some of the doom-seeking and explain the real story. We remove all the spin and try to explain matters in plain English. We help everyone to understand the actual risk to their daily lives, not the “Panican” response. For example, the tit for tat between Russia and Ukraine isn’t really going to lead to nuclear war or an invasion of Europe, but the Russian attacks on Black Sea shipping and the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil production WILL affect prices for you.
It’s easy to decide that “nothing ever happens”, but that’s just not true. Just yesterday, a woman was killed on a subway for no apparent reason. Flash mob street takeovers are happening every night in random places around the country and they are not “teen takeovers” as the media calls them, they are violent mini-riots that have lead to damage and injuries.
Don’t let normalcy bias get you. Keep the torch lit and stay on your watchtower.
I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts….
Habakuk 2:1
At a minimum, always carry an Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK). It needs to have a tourniquet, some type of hemostatic dressing or gauze, a pressure bandage, and gloves at a minimum. It sounds like a lot, but this small of a kit can fit in your back pocket. I carry a larger kit that includes additional bandages in the outside bottom pocket of my backpack. I also keep a larger, mass casualty kit in the rear of my car. Solatac and Refuge Medical both make good kits.
First aid training and supplies are the preparedness items you could potentially use every day – far more than the firearms everyone focuses on. We are hosting a wilderness first aid course here June 25-26 (find it here: https://site.corsizio.com/event/6a0e13f6ab28740444804b30).
After first aid skills, unarmed self defense combative skills should be next. If you have unarmed fighting skills, you are never defenseless. You can’t forget to take skills with you when you go places. Learn basic unarmed defense, basic ground fighting, and stick & knife fighting. You can learn all of these in my weekend-long Combative class. We also teach “cold firearms combatives” which is using the firearm as a blunt object, and yes, we teach bayonet fighting as well. Take some sort of martial art or combatives. Make sure that the one you take is PRACTICAL, not THEORETICAL. Be realistic, you aren’t actuallly going to use jump spinning kicks for self defense.
Always be as armed as you legally can be. Understand the laws in your states and make solid risk assessment decisions about what that means for you. Consider some non-lethal options as well. I carry pressure point devices and tactical pens at a minimum. Learn what the law is for expandable batons in your state. I wouldn’t rely on sprays, because you can’t control the wind direction. Decide now to never be a victim, and to never get complacent.
I know prices are high, but you will pay less over time if you continue to fill up your car every day. If you keep waiting for the prices to drop, there may come a day when the gas is suddenly unavailable and you need to leave the area. Don’t fall into that trap. It sucks, but keep doing it.
We are living in unprecedented times. I know it seems like the “Big Event” is never going to happen, but every day we creep farther over the line. Some day, historians will comment that we crossed the line into the abyss without ever realizing it until we were years beyond it. Incrementalism is just as bad as a black swan event.
Stay prepared, friends.
Come and join us at Mountain Readiness West July 24-26 here at Camp Ponderosa. Use code WISDOM5 to save 5%.
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