Planning to Failure or Failure to Plan

"The fact that our culture’s only vision of someone who is prepared is the survivalist curled up in a shack with his stash of guns suggests that we fundamentally think that preparation for negative outcomes is on the whacked out side." - Sharon

Add the negative image of those that prepare to our current cultural aversion to saving anything and it is no wonder that the circumstance she describes about the recent power outages in her area are true.

And this leads to a painful reality - despite the fact that winter power outages happen out my way all the time, we know for a fact that the extended outages in my region there will leave us with people who are freezing, and hungry, isolated and unable to cope. They won’t have the batteries for their flashlights, or any strategy for cooking or eating. At best, they will come out of this traumatized and miserable. At worst, some of them may actually die.

Of course she is talking of simple, predictable things like power outages resulting from winter storms and people living in areas prone to such still not preparing.