The Realities of Choosing a Retreat Location | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

outstanding article

Unfortunately, having a ‘Plan B’ just isn’t the modern American way. The great and diabolical misfortune of having two to three solid generations of assumed prosperity in one’s culture is the side-effect it has of lulling the populace into comfortable apathy. “Prepping” becomes a kind of novelty; a lifestyle that people joke about while planning out their next vacation or their next suburban home purchase. It’s something that others consider in that fleeting moment in front of the television while witnessing the news of a catastrophe on the other side of the world, only to be forgotten minutes after changing the channel. Such things do not happen here. Not in the United States…

I am a child of an age laden with illusory wealth, and have benefitted (for a short time at least) from the financial fakery of our economic system, as have many Americans. Most of us have not had to suffer through the unmitigated poverty, hopelessness, and relentless fear that are pervasive in harsher days. All our problems could be cured with money, especially government money, and as long as the greenbacks were flowing, we didn’t care where they came from. Ultimately, though, the ease of our well-to-do welfare kingdom has set us up for a cultural failure of epic proportions. Anytime a society allows itself to be conditioned with dependency, its fate is sealed.

We do not know what crisis really is. Many Americans barely have an inkling of what it entails. We imagine it, in films, in books, and in our own minds, but the fantasy is almost numbing. We lose sight of the tangible grating salty rawness of the worst of things, while imagining ourselves to be “aware”. Most people today are like newborns playing merrily in a pit of wolves.

Preppers, on the other hand, are those who seek to understand what the rest of the public goes out of its way to ignore. They embrace the reality and inevitability of disaster, and suddenly, like magic, they are able to see its oncoming potential where others cannot (or will not). The price they pay for this extended vision, however, is high…

I see the prepper generation as a generation of sacrifice; men and women who must endure the collapse of the façade for the sake of an honorable future society they may not live to experience. Modern day Cassandras? Hopefully not. But, certainly a group of people who have lost much in the path to knowledge. We lose our blissful naivety. That which once easily entertained us becomes banal and meaningless. We set aside many of our dreams to make room for the private and public battle we must wage for the truth. And, in the early days of our awakening, we tend to lose sleep.

The primary advantage of this otherwise complex life is actually simple: we have a ‘Plan B’.

Independence, self sustainability, true community, and redundancy in systems; it’s all in a day’s work for the prepper. But, one thing tends to sit upon our minds above all else, and that subject is ‘home’. Not necessarily the home where we are, but the home where we will shelter during darker days. Call it a retreat, call it a bunker, call it whatever you like, but every prepper has to have that place set aside that gives him the utmost advantage while facing off against calamities that normally annihilate average people.

Choosing a retreat can be easy, or so difficult it explodes your brain depending on how you approach it. The problem I see most often with those seeking a back-up location for a collapse scenario is that they engage the process as if they are still living in 2006, hunting for their McMansion with a view on the sunny hillsides of Colorado or California, instead of thinking in practical terms. So, to help clarify a more fundamental approach to choosing a survival retreat, here is a list of priorities that cannot be overlooked:

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