It's all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out huh? Lot's of glib replies here, got it all figured out huh?
Well I'm not a prepper but as I see it there there are two kinds of prepping.
The 1st is when nature takes away electricity. You see how crazed people are when they predict a 6-8" snow storm, you'd think no one had any food in their house. You'd think that bread and milk were never going to be available again for months. You need some supplies to make it 2 or 4 maybe 7 days. Then your world returns to normal.
And then there's the other kind, the we're not in Kansas anymore Toto and that kind is no joke. You can have that nice farm and big garden, you can stock pile firewood and water you can have gold and silver. But when TSHTF, to be honest when the hordes come from the populated suburbs and especially the urban cities, you need people in addition to all that. You need people you can trust your life with and they can trust theirs with you and you'll need guns and lots of ammo.
People riot when their "team" wins whatever championship game they played. What do you think they'll do when they haven't eaten in 5 days, when their children are hungry and sick? People have zero clue how to feed themselves if the stores are out of food. Few if any have any real survival skills and they are coming to take what you have, by any and all means they possess - mark my words.
I laugh at the prepper shows because I can find holes in just about every one of their compounds and TEOTWAWKI plans. But just let a 1 or 2 kilometer wide meteor create a Tunguska event or the one that hit the Yucatan 65 M years ago or the side of an unstable mountain range on the coast of west African (sorry I forget the country) drop 25 cubic miles of dirt and rock into the ocean sending a 600 or 900' tidal wave screaming at the east coast traveling at the speed of a jet or a solar flare/EMP destroy the electrical grid or the super volcano under Yellowstone blow and you'll see things you only saw in your nightmares. And guess what - all these things will happen it's just a matter of when. It might be next year or it might be 200 years (in which case we are off the hook) but eventually these catastrophic events will happen, it is just a matter of time, a matter of when.
Other than Katrina, nothing I remember was on that scale or intensity of that, all the catastrophic events in this country have resolved themselves within days, a week or maybe two. Other than those whose homes were destroyed and loved ones died for the most part things were getting back to some semblance of normal but what if it takes months or years. It was readily apparent on the evening news each night just how society collapsed after Katrina, the law of the jungle was on display, he with the largest club or the firearms was going to get what they wanted. It won't be pretty and it won't matter what you have as much as how you'll protect it from those that have nothing and nothing to lose. If you think you can share, if you think you can reason, if you think because you're well educated and a civil and just person means anything in those scenarios, well pardner you have a huge wake up call coming.
Desperate people do desperate things.