Has The Walking Dead Made You a Survivalist/Prepper?
- Thread starter Ro_Laren
- Start date
I didn't mean that it was funny in a bad way. I meant funny as in it is weird / amazing that it works. Clean water is definitely important and I know from experience what a pain it is to boil water to make it drinkable. I've been to Russia a number of times: the last time I lived there for about a year and a half. If you want to drink the tap water there you have to boil it first or you'll get sick!!! It definitely stunk when I just wanted a glass a water, but had to wait and boil it and then let it cool down!
No, I can't personally say that The Walking Dead nor any other Hollywood depictions of a major disaster have ever led me to become anything approaching a survivalist or diehard prepper. I was a little kid and young teen during the closing years of the Cold War and the big East-West tensions and scares of the late '70s and the '80s, and even in the wake of pretty significant superpower tensions and pop culture megaevents like The Day After I and others just realized there's only so much one can do in the face of something truly horrific. Food supplies only last a certain amount of time no matter how large and reliable they might be, and in a society that might be full of marauding survivors armed to the teeth with whatever practical weaponry they had at their disposal there are limits as to what could be realistically achieved in the event of, say, a Zombie Apocalypse or global war.
It might seem sad and defeatist, but back then the main concern with my generation and our parents seemed to be: if you can't manage to get out of town and flee to a more rural and hopefully safer location in the event of a national emergency, know where the local fallout shelters are. I can still remember standing outside my schools as a boy, looking at the signs denoting the location of a fallout shelter on school grounds and the maximum capacity of the facility in the event of something happening. It wasn't the best feeling in the world and still isn't, but it was what it was. Even those among us whose very lives don't depend on a steady flow of medications would face a pretty grim situation in a short matter of time, so I don't know how much could be gained by going all Wolverines and setting up an armed base camp in the mountains while everything else disintegrates around you.
Suffice it to say for the sake of everybody, let's hope such a major emergency never happens and nobody has to find out.
It might seem sad and defeatist, but back then the main concern with my generation and our parents seemed to be: if you can't manage to get out of town and flee to a more rural and hopefully safer location in the event of a national emergency, know where the local fallout shelters are. I can still remember standing outside my schools as a boy, looking at the signs denoting the location of a fallout shelter on school grounds and the maximum capacity of the facility in the event of something happening. It wasn't the best feeling in the world and still isn't, but it was what it was. Even those among us whose very lives don't depend on a steady flow of medications would face a pretty grim situation in a short matter of time, so I don't know how much could be gained by going all Wolverines and setting up an armed base camp in the mountains while everything else disintegrates around you.
Suffice it to say for the sake of everybody, let's hope such a major emergency never happens and nobody has to find out.
