After last week’s article on sustainment training, I got a couple of queries from folks about how to incorporate non-tactical training aspects of community building into that framework. This is a valid question, since most “prepper groups” are just that—groups of random people with little or nothing in common except an interest in preparedness. I have to admit however, that the question through me for a loop, because it really didn’t make sense to me. Our clan is not a preparedness group. We are a group of lifelong “fr-amily.” We refer, sans irony, to ourselves as family. We spend time together, not just at the holidays, but throughout the year. We gather weekly for recreation. We spend evenings with one another, in various numbers. If we need a “team-building” exercise, something will come up. Someone needs help putting up their house (yours truly, year before last). Someone else, next month, will need help re-roofing their house, or putting up a storage shed, or clearing some brush. Occasionally, we’ll all just gather at one home or another and sit around and play board or card games, and bullshit til the wee hours of the morn. Last Saturday, following our normal range time (which was a medical class this week), we ended up gathered at one home, packing storage food. One of the things we’ve done, at the behest of someone in the clan (not yours truly), is a “communal food storage” project. Basically, everyone contributes X amount per family member, each month, and it is all used to purchase storage food goods. Currently, everyone puts in $5/person/month. Now, is $5 a month, per person enough to store any useful amount of food? Yes and no. No, it’s not going to provide a month of food, per person. It doesn’t need to though. If we’ve been collecting it for three years, and we’re only up to six months worth of food for the whole clan, that’s okay. That’s still six months more than the vast majority of Americans have stored, giving us a significant advantage. Additionally, not all of the families who contribute need to draw on that storage in an emergency. My family, for example, contributes every month, but we also have a year or two of stored food of our own, at the farm. So, our contribution to the community food storage project basically means an entire family has double the amount of food they’ve contributed for. So, we spent a few hours packaging rice and beans and wheat and seasonings into mylar bags, and then into food grade buckets and barrels, so they can be safely stockpiled in various places. After we were done, we sat around for another four or five hours just bullshitting. Some of the conversation was about preparedness, but most of it was telling stories about things we had experienced in our youth or in recent years. We were “making myths” for our clan. We were establishing a tradition of gathering, and a custom of contributing to the community good, through food storage. Both of these are expressive of our shared cultural value of the importance of community. Since we all had our children there as well, and we all dealt with the children in roughly the same manner, “Hey, Johnny, come here. Why is your pull-up full? Either go tell your dad you need a new one, or bring me one so I can change you. You smell like shit!” we are also expressing our shared cultural value of the importance of children and family. Ultimately, what specific activities you and your people will or should participate in will be completely predicated on your contextual considerations. While it may initially need to be planned, coordinated activities, I genuinely believe it needs to quickly become very organic, in the sense that it is a natural outcome of your group’s culture. If your group culture includes sitting around once a week and drinking moonshine, and picking banjos, fucking go for it! If your group culture includes sitting on a tenement building stoop, and rapping or beat-boxing, go for it! Training is important. Food storage is important. But ultimately, spending time building customs and traditions together is MORE important. If there is discord, amongst all, or some, it is time to set the involved parties down and make them talk it out. It may very well turn out that someone, despite years of being close, is now incompatible with the rest of the group. Either they need to fix their shit, or they need to go elsewhere. Neither option is “wrong,” but one is more right than the other, especially if there is a record of shared history that has built “frith.” Yes, it is critically important to make sure everyone is training. Make sure everyone is doing PT. Make sure everyone is setting aside food. Do regular things along these lines as a group. But…at the end of it all….if you’re not genuinely friends, or even “fr-amily,” with legitimate care and concern for the well-being of others within the group, you don’t have a group. You’ve got a bunch of individuals and/or families who will fall the fuck apart at the first sign of trouble, if one of those families or individuals feels like they can get ahead or survive, by turning on/against the others. That’s not conducive to long-term survival of the individuals or the group. That level of “frith,” intra-group loyalty, cannot be built through artificialities. It requires natural, organic, bonding of the group into a cohesive whole. Conveniently, I wrote an entire book about this very subject: Forging the Hero… Continue reading...
