Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon
Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon
Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon
Ebook420 pages8 hours

Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The word ‘prepper’ seems to have burst onto the scene within the last 10 years, and has increasingly become associated with “fringe” extremists. They have been labeled by some as “domestic terrorists.” But is prepping a new phenomenon? Or is it a manifestation of a growing collective psyche that has learned, from traumatic events throughout our history, that preparedness is critical to human survival? For new preppers who think the worst is yet to come, this book offers a walk through history that shows the worst has been here before. For those who wonder why so many people are concerned about being prepared, this book will show that when the worst has made an appearance, those who weathered it best were those who were prepared. For those already familiar with history’s worst who think, “THAT will never happen again!”—this book offers a reminder of the Wall Street adage: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” For those who wonder what a prepper is, this book offers a look at what they used to be—and what they are today.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherPrepper Press
Release dateNov 26, 2014
ISBN9781939473257
Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon
Author

Lynda King

Lynda King is a former newspaper editor who also enjoyed--and continues to enjoy--a career as a freelance writer and editor. She was a columnist for Hobby Farm Home magazine and a contributor to its sister publication, Urban Farm, for which she wrote the cover feature, on sustainability, in the inaugural issue. As a Girl Scout, Lynda learned "Always be prepared!" ... and took that early lesson to heart. It ultimately led her to writing about "preppers," people who are part of a cultural phenomenon that has surfaced in the last several years. Her first book, Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon, was published in August 2014.

Related to Preppers

Related ebooks

Related articles

Reviews for Preppers

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Preppers - Lynda King

    Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon

    by

    Lynda King

    Dystopian Fiction & Survival Nonfiction

    www.PrepperPress.com

    Preppers: History and the Cultural Phenomenon

    Copyright © 2014 by Lynda King

    All rights reserved.

    Smashwords Edition.

    Printed in the United States of America.

    Prepper Press Trade Paperback Edition: July 2014

    Prepper Press is a division of Kennebec Publishing, LLC

    - This book is dedicated to my dear family, who all roll their eyes at each new adventure I embark on, but who, I know, love me just the same.

    About the Author

    Lynda King is a freelance writer who lives with her husband in a 19th-century farmhouse on a one-acre mini-farm in Central Massachusetts, where they maintain a large organic garden and a small flock of chickens. As a Girl Scout, Lynda learned Always be prepared! … and took that early lesson to heart. Today her grandchildren frequently quote her oft-repeated adage: I’d rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

    Lynda is president and cofounder of a group in her town dedicated to creating a self-reliant community. The group has worked closely with the town’s emergency management personnel on organizing a CERT team and has hosted educational programs on emergency preparedness. The group also organizes sustainable living workshops that have included skills such as bread- and cheese-making, home canning, beekeeping, and understanding alternative energy.

    Born and raised in New England, and a proud Yankee through and through, Lynda values self-reliance, and has as one of her favorite quotes a line from the children’s story The Little Red Hen:

    Then I will do it myself, said the Little Red Hen. And she did.

    Table of Contents

    About the Author

    Part One

    Chapter One: Pre-1950s

    Early Warnings

    Weather, War, and Woe

    Hurricanes Catch Our Attention

    Blizzards to Remember

    Tornadoes for the Record Books

    The Earth Moves

    Winds of War

    Financial Storm Clouds Roll In

    The Worst of Hard Times

    Dawn of the Nuclear Age

    Run-Up to War

    The New Face of War

    The Advent of Civil Defense

    Life on the Home Front

    Abrogation of Rights

    The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

    Chapter Two: Postwar Years to 1960s

    The Cold War

    Background

    It Starts

    The State of Civil Defense

    Smoldering Embers

    Super Bombs

    Duck and Cover

    Suspicion Reigns

    Wars Flare

    Painful Truths Revealed

    Culture in Crisis

    International Bully

    Communists Close to Home

    The Nation Mourns

    Protests, Conspiracies, and Revelations

    Demonstrations Flare

    Possible Plots

    Discoveries and Dangers

    Fueling the Future?

    Toxic Times

    Faulted

    Time to Retreat

    Blacked Out

    Planning for Collapse

    Chapter Three: 1970s to 1990s

    Preparedness Rising

    Energy-Challenged

    Life Without Oil

    The Pursuit of Power

    Nuclear Nightmares

    In the U.S.: Three Mile Island

    In Russia: Chernobyl

    In Stock: Formidable Weapons

    Loose Nukes

    Killing the Planet

    Tainted Ground

    Toxic Waters

    Government: The Dark Side

    Secrets Revealed

    Power Unchecked

    Finances, Food, and Foes

    Navigating Financial Waters

    ‘Frankenfood’?

    Global Insecurity

    Nature Offers Its Worst

    Ravaging Gales

    Seismic Surprises

    Storms from Space

    Meanwhile, Feds Prepare

    Bugged Out

    Chapter Four: 2000–Present

    When Terror Attacks

    War Powers

    Systemic Schizophrenia

    The Rise of DHS

    Guidance for Citizens

    Dangers Declassified

    Americans as Guinea Pigs

    Pandemic Possibilities

    Nukes Over North Carolina

    Nuclear War Games

    Crumbling Economy?

    Life in the Dark

    Threats from Cyberspace

    Nature’s Worst Redefined

    Super Quakes

    Super Storms

    Monster Tornadoes

    Transitioning Towns

    Part Two

    Chapter Five: What is Modern Preparedness?

    The Movement Today

    Modern Prepping Lifestyles

    Evolution of a Prepper

    Philosophies of Modern Prepping

    The Influence of Technology

    Internet Communities

    On Steroids: Foresight and Hindsight

    Gadgets and Gear

    Reskilling

    Rediscovering Lost Arts

    Applying New Techniques and Learning from the Experts

    On Beyond Agriculture

    Saving It for Later

    Who ARE These People?

    Chapter Six: What Are People Preparing For?

    Collapse of the Grid

    Space-Age Stalkers

    Threats from Outer Space

    Collapse of the Economy

    What It Could Look Like

    Resource Shortages

    Civil Disorder

    Government Out of Order

    Chapter Seven: How Do Preppers Prep?

    Planning

    Preparing

    The Bug-out Bag

    The Bug-out Location

    Security

    Survival

    Food Storage and Supplies

    Water

    Energy

    Communications

    Finances

    Practice Makes Perfect

    Chapter Eight: The Business of Prepping

    Bug-out Bags

    Water

    Food

    Shelter

    The List Goes On

    Chapter Nine: The Future of Prepping

    APPENDICES

    REFERENCES

    Part One

    The History of Preparedness

    "Prepare for the unknown

    by studying how others in the past

    have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable."

    ― Gen. George S. Patton

    During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that.

    — Maya Angelou, American author and poet

    Introduction

    Anyone who has been a member of the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts has had the motto be prepared drummed into their heads at countless meetings, ceremonies, and outings. Since 1910 these two organizations have been teaching youths of our country responsibility, citizenship, character, courage, personal fitness, environmental stewardship—and preparedness.

    Once thought of primarily as a collection of skills for camping and wilderness survival, today’s preparedness is far more encompassing, and is accepted by many as an important aspect of living in a modern, complex world. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), emphasizes emergency preparedness for individuals and businesses as a way to reduce or prevent loss of property or loss of life in the face of disaster.

    On its website, www.Ready.gov, FEMA maintains a list of possible disasters—from a host of natural disasters to dozens attributable to man, through accidents or terrorism. The site offers instructions for people on how to assess their risks for experiencing some of them, how to develop emergency plans, and how to put together a kit of disaster supplies.

    FEMA also offers resources to help communities start Citizens Emergency Response Teams (CERT teams) to assist first responders in the wake of disaster. Trainees learn about natural, technological, and other disasters and their potential impact on a community’s infrastructure and stability.

    Beyond the emergency readiness advocated by the government, preparedness has emerged as a cultural phenomenon of which many people have only recently become aware. The term prepper was thrust into the public spotlight in February 2012, when the National Geographic Channel launched its reality series, Doomsday Preppers. The show looks at the lives of people who are focused on emergency preparedness in ways that most people are not, people anticipating a number of different events that could bring an end to the world as we know it.

    The preppers making up this new cultural phenomenon prepare for emergencies beyond short-term power outages and damaging weather, focusing on events with wide-ranging, long-term impact, such as a worldwide pandemic, destruction of the country’s power grid, global warming, and economic collapse. They organize their lives to provide for their basic needs should the worst happen, and refer to the things they do and the things they buy for this purpose as their preps; and their preps can include everything from food storage and water purification to building underground bunkers and stockpiling weapons.

    The public’s curiosity has been aroused. According to Nielsen Media, more than 2 million viewers tuned in to the Season 2 premiere of Doomsday Preppers. ¹

    The Washington Post, in a report on its website in November 2012 about the popularity of Doomsday Preppers, claimed that the show attracts viewers with an apocalyptic mentality, and went on to say that the show had become a hit in part because of the paranoia and survivalist instincts it conjures.

    In December 2012, the term prepper came into full public view by way of the country’s major news outlets, in the aftermath of the horrific massacre of 20 schoolchildren and seven adults in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooter, Adam Lanza, killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at her home, before using several of her guns to carry out the school shooting that ended the lives of 20 young students and six school administrators. Marsha Lanza, Nancy’s sister-in-law, described her as a prepper who was concerned about economic collapse. Marsha told reporters her sister-in-law had a collection of guns for self-defense and said she liked to shoot them. Subsequent news accounts reported that Nancy often took her son to the shooting range for target practice.

    The tragic and horrifying incident sparked an outcry for more gun control, but it also raised questions for the uninitiated about who and what preppers are. The association of the term prepper with this event caused many people to equate preppers with radical extremists seen to be on the fringes of normal society, evoking images of people like reclusive survivalist Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who engaged in a nationwide reign of home-grown terror from 1978 to 1995.²

    In an article about the Newtown incident, posted on the website www.foreignpolicy.com, writer JM Berger said, While there’s not much solid research to be had, anecdotal observations certainly give the impression that there’s a higher incidence of mental illness among hardcore preppers than in the general population, and the nature of their beliefs and social networks may create obstacles to diagnosis and treatment.

    Questioned by this author about a source for these observations, Berger said, When I say anecodotal, it means there isn’t data, but when you go look at prepper media and writings, you can obviously see a certain amount of crazy on display to an extent that should be acknowledged even if it can’t be measured.

    Preppers in Popular Culture

    Lacking any hard data, people newly exposed to the idea of prepping are left to form their own opinions about who preppers are, based on their own experience, their own worldview, and whatever they find in the media, in popular culture, or on the Web.

    Since the debut of Doomsday Preppers, many media outlets have picked up on the prepping story, which has been featured on television, online, and in print. In addition, there has been a recent explosion of books written about possible catastrophic events, from both the fictional and nonfictional perspective, all offering inspiration for would-be preppers.

    Books

    Apocalyptic fiction looks at the struggles of people surviving some calamitous event—people who are prepared, and people who are not. However, despite the recent spate of disaster-themed books filling store shelves and booklists at Amazon.com, apocalyptic story-telling is not new. As far back as 1826, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man, a futuristic novel about a world devastated by disease. George R. Stewart repeated this theme in his 1949 novel, Earth Abides.

    It seems that society has long been fascinated by doomsday stories; and although some of them are fantastic enough that we can just sit back and enjoy the story—like The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham, 1951), about aggressive plants taking over the world—recent literature has brought us face-to-face with things some believe really could happen, because we’ve seen elements of them in real life.

    Pat Frank’s 1959 classic, Alas, Babylon, is one of several post-World War II novels dealing with nuclear war. Frank’s book looks at the effects of such a war on the United States, specifically a small town in Central Florida. We know of the horror and ruin unleashed by the U.S.’s nuclear attack on Japan in 1945, but the idea of such an event happening in our country seems unthinkable. Alas, Babylon and its ilk are scarier than The Day of the Triffids, because readers can visualize in real terms the nuclear devastation that could happen—it has happened before; the potential is there. Increasingly, themes of modern apocalyptic literature deal with threats that were unimagined in Mary Shelley’s time.

    In James Wesley Rawles’ book, Patriots (1998, 2009), the disintegration of society is brought about by an economic collapse, for which only small groups of people are prepared. In David Dalglish’s A Land of Ash (2010), the Yellowstone caldera, identified by scientists in the 1960s-1970s,³ is what lays waste to the world. In Willam R. Forstchen’s 2011 book release, One Second After, an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, ends civilization as we know it, knocking out everything powered by electricity—including modern transportation.

    It is important to note that much of today’s apocalyptic fiction focuses on some disastrous event that brings about The End Of The World As We Know It—TEOTWAWKI (pronounced tee-ought-wah-key) in prepper parlance—not the end of the planet.

    Nonfiction books on the subject offer an abundance of information about threats that could truly doom society, such as those enumerated in Lawrence E. Joseph’s 2008 entry, Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End. The book, written ahead of the much-heralded 2012 Mayan doomsday allegedly foretold by the ancient Mayans’ long-count calendar, discusses a long list of possibilities that include catastrophic earthquakes, deadly solar flares, and the alignment of the Solar System’s orbit with a gravitationally dense region of the Milky Way that could set off a storm of asteroids raining down upon the Earth.

    But beyond offering events to fear, the growing body of disaster-related nonfiction also offers practical advice on steps people can take to survive any number of disasters. Dr. Arthur T Bradley’s Handbook to Practical Disaster Preparedness for the Family (2010), presents 440 pages of information on putting together an emergency preparedness plan, covering everything from first aid to food storage, water purification, financial preparations, and more. Bernie Carr’s Prepper’s Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for a Disaster (2011), gives suggestions about the basics—creating a 72-hour survival kit, an emergency contact list, and a master list of passwords—as well as the not-so-routine: calculating your family’s requirements for water and food, investing in precious metals, and using sunlight to disinfect water, to name a few.

    Television and Movies

    Books are not the only means by which reasons to prepare have infiltrated the public psyche. Television and movies have served up their own share of apocalyptic stories, and have for many years. (In movies, Godzilla was wreaking havoc on Japan as far back as 1954.) But while some of these productions have focused on the end of the world, or parts of it, others have focused on actually surviving cataclysms, making them more appealing to the prepper community—offering not only entertainment, but also practical information.

    In 2006 CBS launched the TV series Jericho, which ran through September 2008. The show centered around the residents of a small, fictional town in Kansas that was spared the direct wrath of 23 nuclear attacks in the U.S., but, along with other communities that were similarly fortunate, was left isolated from the outside world, with no power, no transportation, and no food, beyond the two days’ worth of groceries on the shelf in the local store. The residents found themselves woefully unprepared, and throughout the course of the series, struggled to survive. TV Guide, in 2007, ranked the program #11 on its list of top cult shows.

    NBC launched its doomsday-themed TV series, Revolution, in the fall of 2012. The series follows a cast of characters and their exploits several years after some unknown event triggers a worldwide blackout on the scale of an EMP, affecting both the lights and motor-powered transportation. It is in the background of the story that we see the primitive culture with which they have survived, where the manicured lawns of today’s familiar McMansions have been transformed into vegetable gardens that abut crude wattle fences helping to contain goats and chickens. According to a report in USA Today on January 6, 2013, the show was fall’s most popular new series among younger viewers.

    In the world of movies, The Divide (2011) explores how survivors of a nuclear attack continue on after the end of contemporary society, and a 2012 offering, Remnants, looks at how a community pulls together after a disaster from the heavens causes a worldwide blackout and illustrates what can happen in a community when some people are prepared for disaster and others are not.

    A Renewal of Prepping

    A look at history shows that there have always been survivalists of one kind or another. There is often renewed interest in preparedness following some kind of catastrophe. In a presentation for a National Severe Weather Workshop in 2008, the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) confirmed, Emergency management almost has no natural constituency base until an emergency or disaster occurs.

    By some accounts, renewed interest in preparedness started after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. Others say it is more recent. According to author James Wesley Rawles, interest in the preparedness movement has doubled annually since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005.

    The Survival Podcast website (www.TheSurvivalPodcast.com), launched in 2008, says its members number around 45,000. Tom Martin, one of the cofounders of the American Preppers Network (http://americanpreppersnetwork.com), says that 32,000 people have joined the network since the debut of the website in 2008, and that number, he says, is constantly going up.

    It’s unclear how to measure the number of people who are preppers. By some estimates that number is 3 to 4 million in the U.S. alone. Martin says he thinks the number is impossible to track, since many people might not classify themselves that way. Anyone who prepares is a prepper, he says. But many of them never heard of the word ‘prepper’ before. If you take into account members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who live by the precept of providing for every needful thing, storing at least a year’s supply of food, the number of preppers in the U.S. alone is more than 5 million people.

    With millions of people out there purported to be prepping for disaster, it begs the questions: Who are preppers, really? Are they radical, fringe extremists? Or are they rational people responding to real, potential threats? And if so, what are they preparing for exactly—how, and why? This book will attempt to answer these questions by first looking at events in our country’s distant and not-so-distant past that have helped the prepper movement evolve into what it is today.

    Part One:

    The History of Preparedness

    Chapter One: Pre-1950s

    Early Warnings

    It has been said that people have been preparing for the end of time since the beginning of time. Indeed, many of the predictions about the end or the world have their origins in cultural and religious traditions, legends, and myths about how the world came to be.

    Scores of end-times predictions are rooted in the theology of the Abrahamic faiths— Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In the Qur’ran, Surah 54:1 talks about signs in the heavens that will signal the end of the world—the splitting of the moon and the falling of stars. The Old Testament book Numbers foretells that the appearance of a Messiah will herald the end of days, and the New Testament is filled with symbolic prophecies about the end of the world. Although a preponderance of doomsayers point to the book of Revelation, with its hellfire-and-brimstone imagery, as the source for beliefs about the end of time, there is another Biblical prophecy in 2 Peter, 3:10 that succinctly and vividly describes the end:

    But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that Day the heavens will disappear with a shrill noise, the heavenly bodies will burn up and be destroyed, and the earth with everything in it will vanish.

    But it is not just the traditions of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths that hold a belief about end times. As far back as the 22nd century B.C., the Assyrians were predicting the end of the world. Writer Mark Strauss, in a 2009 article for Smithsonian.com, noted this inscription on an Assyrian clay tablet dating from 2800 B.C.:

    Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

    Some of the world’s great non-Abrahamic religions characterize the end of the world as part of a repeating cycle of birth, growth, downfall, recovery, and rebirth—a cycle that usually ends with the Earth’s destruction. Hinduism foretells the arrival of the final incarnation of Vishnu on a white horse ushering in the end of the world after eradicating evil and freeing the worthy from this cycle. Buddhism tradition describes an enlightened being named Maitreya bringing about the end of the world as we know it by rescuing humanity and promoting a universal brotherhood on Earth.

    One of the most famous predictions about the world’s end originated with the 1996 translation of hieroglyphs on a portion of an ancient Mayan monument discovered in Tabasco, Mexico in the 1960s.¹⁰ After the stone, dubbed Monument 6, was unearthed during the construction of a concrete factory in Tabasco, the location in which it was found was preserved as an archaeological site known as El Tortuguero. The translated excerpt that caused such a stir is known as the Tortuguero passage.

    Scholars believe that the ancient Mayan civilization was one of those that held beliefs about cycles of birth, death, and renewal, and that those cycles were represented by dates noted on the so-called Mayan long-count calendar. Many scholars believed that the Tortuguero passage pointed to a date at the end of the long-count calendar that was interpreted to be December 21, 2012. According to authors Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, in their book, 2012 and the End of the World, one translation of the passage in question is: The thirteenth calendrical cycle will end on the day 4 Ahua, the third of Uniiw, when there will occur blackness (or a spectacle) and the God of the Nine will come down to the red (or be displayed in a great investiture). The conclusion reached by many was that the passage predicted the end of creation on December 21, 2012.

    However, in their book, Restall and Solari go on to make the argument that this monument was not prophetic in nature, but was, rather, celebratory, possibly part of a building dedication, akin to a cornerstone that might say, Built in 1900, this building will stand until 2012.¹¹ Their theory might have been right—December 21, 2012, has come and gone, but creation has not.

    History is filled with predictions about the end of the world, but in most of these predictions, mankind does not survive, and no one expects much forewarning about the cataclysm that will bring about the end. Many of the end-times prophecies come with an admonition for people to prepare for the end by mending their evil ways, that they might be spared the wrath of the gods and selected for eternal life in a post-cataclysm paradise. Some early cultures—the Mayans among them—adopted the practice of sacrificing animals, or even humans, as a way of appeasing the gods. History has few accounts of ancient preppers expecting to survive, through their own efforts, the foretold destruction of the world.

    However, one exception can be found in the Old Testament book Genesis—believed by some to have been written sometime around the 6th or 5th centuries B.C.—which tells the story of Noah. Noah may well have been history’s first-known prepper. According to the story, God forewarns Noah of a catastrophic flood, and gives him detailed instructions on building an ark for the purpose of saving a select number of humans and animals from the deluge. Clearly, Noah expected to survive, and according to the story, he did. The flood arrived as foretold, and Noah not only survived, but lived until the ripe old age of 950.¹²

    Most end-times predictions are not as hopeful as Noah’s story: Noah and his family survived, along with representative animals from every species, according to the Biblical account. In most ancient stories about the end of the world, it’s really the end—no one survives.

    Some end-of-the-world predications are based on the approach of dates that are seen to be significant; others are based on astronomy, astrology, or disasters that people have experienced. Many early religious leaders, including Pope Sylvester II, a French pope born around 940 AD, predicted that the apocalypse would take place at the end of the Christian Milliennium, in January 1000 CE.¹³ In the 14th century, the appearance of the Black Death sparked speculation that the end-times were imminent.¹⁴

    Spanish adventurer Christopher Columbus wrote in his 16th-century manuscripts, which were published as the Book of Prophecies in the late 19th century¹⁵, that the world would come to an end in 1658, 7,000 years after what he believed to be its beginning, in 5343 BCE. Famed Colonial American preacher and witch hunter Cotton Mather predicted three times that the world would end: 1697, 1716, and 1736.

    The celebrated 16th-century French prophet Nostradamus made many predictions in his work, The Prophecies, published in 1555. Some of his predictions are said to have accurately predicted several modern-day events, among them World War II and the rise of Hitler, the detonation of an atomic bomb at Hiroshima, and even the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Some who study his writings say that his predictions for the 21st century include periods of war, famine, disease, extreme weather events, and an upheaval of religious and social orders. Although he made no specific predictions calling out the end of the world, he did write that his prophecies went only as far as 3797, leaving some to infer that we have until then to worry about the end.

    End-of-the-world predictions notwithstanding, early traditions also offer warnings about the need to assess the risks of misfortune and prepare accordingly. The Biblical book of Proverbs (6: 6-11), thought to have been written around 900 BC, offers this caution:

    Lazy people should learn a lesson from the way ants live. They have no leader, chief, or ruler, but they store up their food during the summer, getting ready for winter. How long is the lazy man going to lie around? When is he ever going to get up? ‘I’ll just take a short nap,’ he says; ‘I’ll fold my hands and rest awhile.’ But while he sleeps, poverty will attack him like an armed robber.

    The book repeats this commendation of ants in chapter 30:25, calling them out as one of four animals in the world that are small, but very, very clever:

    Ants … are weak, but they store up their food in the summer.

    These warnings in Proverbs likely influenced the well-known tale of the ant and the grasshopper credited to storyteller Aesop (of Aesop’s Fables), who is thought to have lived between 620 and 564 BC. The story is about a grasshopper that spends the summer months singing and playing, and invites the ant to join in. The ant replies:

    I am helping to lay up food for the winter, and recommend you to do the same.

    The grasshopper responds:

    Why bother about winter? We have got plenty of food at present.

    When winter comes, the grasshopper, dying of hunger, crawls to the ant, begging for food. The ant scolds the grasshopper, saying that since it spent the summer singing, it could spend the winter dancing. The lesson for the grasshopper?

    It is best to prepare for the days of necessity.

    Traditions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also offer counsel in preparing for hard times. Its beliefs about preparedness are rooted in the 19th century, when the church’s prophet, Joseph Smith, was said to have received a number of revelations recorded for posterity in its Doctrines and Covenants. Among them, in D&C 109:8, are these words of warning:

    Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing …

    Smith’s disciples have, since that time, taken care to follow these words, and the church today advises followers in ways to prepare. Expounding upon Smith’s original pronouncement, the church offers these words:

    Our Heavenly Father created this beautiful earth, with all its abundance, for our benefit and use. His purpose is to provide for our needs as we walk in faith and obedience. He has lovingly commanded us to ‘prepare every needful thing’ (see D&C 109:8) so that, should adversity come, we may care for ourselves and our neighbors and support bishops as they care for others.

    Preparing for seasons of want was a theme that resonated with the ancients. Our ancestors were well acquainted with the hardships of early life—drought and famine among them—and from the earliest times took steps to protect themselves from those privations by engaging in some sort of

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1