Prep Series Week 10: Talk About Preparedness

Welcome to the final week of our Ten Weeks to Preparedness series! 

Thank you for being along the ride with us. We’d love to hear about what you’ve taken away from this series. What has helped you? What do you have questions about? We’ll continue to have discussions about this series. Our next series will be focused on community preparedness. Stay tuned for that as it will likely launch in the Fall. In the meantime, thanks for being on this journey with us!

And also, if you missed anything or want to review past content, you can always find this series at the Resources & Toolkits page of Cramming for the Apocalypse.

Depending on the people around you, preparedness can be a tricky subject. In my (Elizabeth’s) experience, the most common reactions I get when I mention emergency preparedness are 1) the person doesn’t want to talk about it because it makes them too stressed out to think about it, or 2) a bit of skepticism rooted in preconceptions of “preppers.” 

The latter example happened recently in a funny way when a neighbor-friend Zoe invited a new neighbor who I haven’t met yet to our emergency preparedness meeting. The new neighbor reacted in a somewhat horrified way with “are they right-wing doomsday preppers?” To be fair, I wonder how Zoe described the meeting because in a previous conversation she asked, “when are we going to have our doomsday prepper meeting?” The whole thing is funny because we’ve kind of reclaimed “prepper” terminology for our own little liberal community. But it highlights the preconceptions of “prepping”–something I’ve written about before.

That’s why Brekke is very clear about not using the terms “prepping” when she talks about preparedness. Rather she mostly focuses on “emergency preparedness.” Emergency preparedness is something that most people, regardless of their political leaning, can get on board with. And in fact, she sees that a lot of those with progressive leanings are already practicing preparedness in their own way, she’s just marrying the concepts of sustainability with preparing for emergencies. But it takes talking about preparedness for people to see what they’re doing through a preparedness lens. 

It’s also essential to talk about preparedness with those around you to normalize it. That first reaction I’ve experienced from people–they don’t want to talk about it because it overwhelms them–is a natural response to something that’s hard to hear. They’re experiencing cognitive dissonance with an idea that they know they need to confront, but is hard to. And one of the first reactions to dissonance is to turn away from it, ignore it. But that doesn’t help anyone if disaster strikes. There’s a way to normalize conversations about preparedness and that is good for everyone in an emergency.

So that’s why we’re concluding this ten-week series with tips on how to talk about preparedness.