United States: At the showroom “Survival & Prepper Show,” Brook Morgan saw piles of ammunition, trauma medical kits, and whatever type of knife the human mind could even think about.
A 30-year-old vulnerability who has come from Indiana and described herself as a lesbian is one of the new bunch of Americans who take the preparedness for political upheaval and natural catastrophes; this used to be which is largely considered the association of far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980’s, as reported by Reuters.
Prepper Population Doubles
Researchers said that now the population of preppers has doubled to around 20 million as compared to 2017. There is the majority of growth that is coming from minorities and people who are closer to left politically, whose insecurities were highlighted after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when more extreme weather became normal, and when the racial justice protests took place after the murder of George Floyd.
“I’m really surprised by the number of people of color here,” Morgan said. “I always went to these shows with my family in Indiana and it was just white people who were my parents’ age. There are a lot of younger people here, too. It’s a real change.”
Morgan was raised by preppers, and even though she is now an adult, she still sees herself as independent and able to handle any disaster. However, she also changed her mind about this movement because it was grey and conservative to a significant extent.
The statement of extreme partisanship was apparent at the Survival & Prepper show in Boulder County, a liberal district in which President Biden won by over 57 percentage points over Trump in the last election that occurred just a year ago. Over 2,700 people of USD10 each through the door, the event organizers revealed. The attendees varied from eclectic to focused students.
The people were unusually dressed – bearded white men with closely cropped hair and heavily tattooed arms. And so too were the flower-crown-wearing mommies with babies in rainbow color carriers seeking advice on canning, Latino families peering into greenhouses and water filtration systems, and the members of the 2021 Mountain View Fire Rescue Team, who on the 8th of April battled a fire in the region and gave CPR demonstrations to encourage citizens to be more prepared for extreme.
The show reverberated the problem of an entire nation where the millions of Americans no longer can expect the government or the private industry to fulfill their basic needs such as electricity, water, and food.
Their arguments were based on the pandemic disruptions of supply chains, the power crisis in Texas in 2021, which left millions without power, and the recent outages for thousands of AT&T mobile users.
Colonel Chris Ellis Analyzes Prepper Growth
Colonel Chris Ellis, a US Army worker, is mainly focused on preparing for disasters and providing relief, as well as being a prominent investigator of the prepper movement who has backtracked its growth to 20 million people based on household resiliency data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
He said that what shapes individual preppers – which he defines as someone who can live for a month with no outside support – is how they react to a single question: “Do I feel safe?”
“People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions,” said Ellis, who underscored that he did not speak on behalf of the Department of Defense.
People who are moved by climate change, he stated, tend to be the homesteaders who grow their own food and go to weather-friendly destinations, including Duluth, Minnesota, with moderate summers.
While the majority of people who worry about anarchy are often the stereotypical gun owners that are typically associated with the prepper community, the rest are just as likely to be your ordinary American. The super-rich, well-off, specifically, will likely react to their fears by giving out millions to build luxury bunkers in far-away locations.
Diverse Motivations Behind Prepping
In the eyes of John Ramey- a former innovation advisor to the Obama administration and initiator of the prepper site- The Prepared- this community resembles American society in terms of political stance and demographic categories.
“The only real unifying denominator among preppers these days is people who are smart enough to be aware of what the world is like … and they have the gumption to do something about it,” Ramey said.
Finally, at the prepper show at the Boulder County fairgrounds, Jennifer Council gave an example of an axe was good for saying that it was the “ultimate multipurpose tool,” whether it was used for cutting small trees or accomplishing the small-scale tasks required for tinder to work.
Changing Perceptions
Council, a 50-year-old Black woman mother of three adult children and a self-term black urban farmer is a resident of a suburban area northwest of Denver, as reported by Reuters.
“Preppers used to be seen as extreme weirdos,” the Council said. “Then the pandemic happened, and grocery stores were short on food. Then you had the unrest of protests around the police killings of young Black men. Then you had the storming of the Capitol in Washington.”
“People are realizing that it’s important to be able to depend on what you can do for yourself.”