Watch Your Back

Dear Fellow Survivalist;

This year has undoubtedly been the craziest one on record, and it’s not yet half way over. If there’s any one lesson that this year seems to be trying to teach us, it’s “watch your back.” It’s almost like the next big problem is trying to sneak up on us at every turn and hit us over the head. If we don’t watch our collective backs, it will succeed in doing just that.

But that’s why we have all been preparing, isn’t it? Just because the problems that we have been facing this year don’t look like the problems we were expecting to face, doesn’t make them any less real. We may not have gotten the disaster we ordered, but we definitely have gotten a series of disasters. With over 100 American cities experiencing violent rioting, social unrest seems to be the disaster de jour, rather than zombies or an EMP.

We find ourselves in a time when professional agitators, paid for by some hidden puppetmaster, are hijacking legitimate demonstrations and turning them into violent riots. Make no mistake, the rioting and looting isn’t about George Floyd anymore, it’s about creating disruption to society and racial division, while trying to get a nice prize to take home.

There are actually three distinct groups on the streets today:

• The legitimate protesters, those we should stand with
• The agitators who are trying to start riots, who need to be locked up
• The looters, who are taking advantage of the situation to enrich themselves in some way. Most have no prior criminal record and are being drug into looting by the mob mentality

It is possible for people in the first group to get drug into the third; but those in the second group, the agitators, are mostly imported to the cities where riots are happening and are being paid to do their “jobs.” If we looked into who they really are, we’d probably find that they are actually true anarchists, trying to destroy our country.

Besides the obvious questions about how this affects our country as a whole, the other question you and I need to ask ourselves is how it affects us personally. How much more danger are we in today, than we were yesterday and how much more will we be in tomorrow.

There may not be a quantifiable way of measuring how much danger any of us are in, at any particular moment of time, nor how that danger level climbs and falls; but we should be aware of it. We should recognize when things are becoming more dangerous and adjust our level of vigilance accordingly.

The other part, which goes hand in hand with this, is always looking forward to try and see the next potential threat. That’s not always possible to do, especially when things go crazy and the whole threat matrix takes a turn in a new directions, such as it has with this sudden wave of violence, brought about by George Floyd’s murder.

But before that, I was trying to look forward through the pandemic and seek out what was coming down the pike. If you look back over my e-mails and compare the dates to many of the events that were happening, such as shortages in the stores, I was generally talking about things before they were happening. That came out of trying to be forward looking and see the potential threats associated with the disease.

Those threats haven’t gone anywhere, even though they’ve disappeared from the news cycle. So now we are facing two concurrent threats, that of COVID-19 and that of the riots. Those in Louisiana, Mississippi and Eastern Texas have a third one as well, called Cristobal. I haven’t looked over my shoulder yet, but there might be a forth one lurking there.

Of course, that forth one might be the second wave of COVID-19. According to some disturbing reports out of China, they currently have 108 million people under lockdown, because they are in their second wave right now. What makes that worse, is that the disease has mutated and is more dangerous than before. we have yet to see if that version will come pay us a visit.

Disasters don’t recognize any need to check our schedules and make sure we have time for them. So it wouldn’t surprise me if another disaster struck, right in the midst of all this. That means we can’t afford to stay so focused on what’s happening, that we forget to look over our collective shoulder. Something might just be lurking there.

So if you’ve run your stockpile down during the lockdown, better get stocked up again. You might need it. In addition to keeping your ammo dry and your survival gear close at hand, of course.