With a "Preppers Eye"

I was watching some of those "prepper reality" shows on TV and I thought that I would offer up my view on them,  for whatever its worth to you.  For starters I know a couple of the people that were featured on one of them.  Those individuals are no where near as whacked out as the network would have you believe.  So if you just enjoy  that kind of programming then they have you pegged.  If you are a prepper and you found that you were saying WTF or That is stupid, well you might be right but I am willing to bet that it was edited  to look more stupid than it was.



I will watch more which is their goal I suppose but I will be watching because I have not yet determined whether or not this is good press for our prepper movement.  Let me make a quick argument on both sides of that coin.

CON's
They make those preppers look more eccentric than most of us really are.  They may be but that is not the norm and it makes it harder for us to convince people to start taking steps toward independence.   If you thought that it was hard convincing family, friend and community to take those first steps before, now we have to contend with the stereotype of "those whackadoos on TV". Additionally the show for the most part only focuses on one unlikely prepping scenario.  This makes no sense to me because anyone that is as far along in their preps as some of those folks, didn't start prepping for a global event, they most likely started small, for local and personal disasters.  This point is completely missed in those shows.  A better platform would be to give information on how to get started, I am sure that they could make it entertaining and educational.  Hell they made grocery shopping, and pest extermination interesting in similar shows.

PRO's
Watching it as a prepper and taking a critical look at the preps the participants actually showed was interesting and exposed some holes in my plan.  I seriously doubt that you can watch too many of those with a preppers eye and not notice a few things that they have done to solve a problem that you are currently working on.  I am happy that they featured some of the community building plans that the featured preppers were working on.  This does a lot to show that we are not reclusive but inclusive.  Another part that I found  interesting was some of the ingenious food storage methods and locations.  I am extremely happy that they did not give any press to the extremist, racist, or otherwise useless individuals that seem to pepper our movement.

Summary
There are of course many more points to both sides of the arguments and I cannot possibly cover them all.  If you are a prepper and you are occasionally trying to convince others that this is a better way to live, I would say that you should watch.  It is nice to know the arguments that people will use against this lifestyle while knowing very little about it.  Other than that, there is value in it as there is in most things.  Nothing is ever entirely good or entirely bad.  You just have to find what you can use and try to make use out of the left over scraps as much as you can.  That's about all I have on that topic.  Stay true to YOUR path and if you are forsaken for it, to hell with whomever cannot accept it.  NM