For Those that Wish to Prepare

     Unfortunately, I have been a bit lax in maintaining my blog, but since this blog post is going to be about preparing for the apocalypse, I feel like I should devote at least a little bit of space to telling you why I think this is important. I am a religious person, and I believe that someday the world as we know it will come to an end. I am not, however, the kind of person that is planning a bomb shelter in her backyard or preaching in the streets that The End is nigh. But aside from any religious belief, I think that preparing for the apocalypse is something that everyone should do because in my mind the apocalypse can take any number of forms. Take, for instance, the single mom that loses her job; the struggling family whose house is flooded; the college student whose parents are killed in a car crash. Have not all these people experienced a profound, and perhaps lasting, change in their lives? Bad things happen all the time, and while many people may not ever experience a 'personal apocalypse,' others of us certainly will, and I believe it's important to recognize that. Even less acute disasters can cause a significant amount of distress, but with adequate preparation some of that distress can possibly be lessened. I recently read a very interesting article in this same vein from Roanoke.com, the website for The Roanoke Times. It's really short and thought provoking and I strongly recommend reading it, but if you're not interested in reading the whole thing I'll just pass along the first paragraph:

"What would you do if you knew? What if you lived in New Orleans last summer, and you knew through some inexplicable cosmic convergence of education, premonition and intuition, that something big was going to happen, sooner rather than later, lasting rather than temporal, avoidable rather than inevitable? Something that would change everything? Who would you tell and how? Would they believe you and would they prepare? Could you prepare yourself?" [1]

     Now that I have hopefully convinced you that the rest of this post might be worth your time to look at, we can talk about actual apocalypse (or general disaster) preparation tactics. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have actually done most of this part for me; an article was recently posted on their Public Health Matters Blog called Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse [2]. Yes, you just read "CDC" in relation to "zombie apocalypse". Conveniently, the preparations they recommend are useful in other kinds of disaster situations, too. The first thing, of course, is to get an emergency kit together. The CDC recommends that you should have the following things in your emergency kit:

• Water (1 gallon per person per day)
• Food (stock up on non-perishable items that you eat regularly)
• Medications (this includes prescription and non-prescription medications)
• Tools and Supplies (utility knife, duct tape, battery powered radio, etc.)
• Sanitation and Hygiene (household bleach, soap, towels, etc.)
• Clothing and Bedding (a change of clothes for each family member, blankets)
• Important documents (copies of your drivers license, passport, birth certificate, etc.)
• First Aid supplies

This is a list of a few of the things you should have. The blog post notes that for a full list of emergency items you should follow the link to their Emergency page. The next thing that you should do to prepare for an emergency is to come up with an emergency plan with your family or whoever you live with. It would kind of be a waste for me to just quote everything they say though, so instead I will direct you to the link at the bottom of this post, where you can find the blog post in question as well as many other useful and informative blog posts by following their link to their Public Health Matters Blog.

     In addition to the excellent information that the CDC has provided for us, I would like to conclude by adding my own two cents about long-term preparation. It is my belief that preparation is about more than stockpiling food and water or keeping a garage full of tools. Preparation is a mindset that should be adopted and implemented in our daily lives, and there are several aspects of this. Knowledge and learning is one aspect of this mindset and an essential part of being prepared for disaster and for life in general; after all, what good is a garage full of tools if you don't know how to use them? Could you perform basic first-aid if a doctor wasn't available? Could you grow your own food if suddenly food wasn't for sale? It's better to learn some of these things before our life or the lives of our loved ones depend on them. The other mindset aspect I would like to mention is that of common sense and just living intelligently. Is it necessary to go into debt to buy that third car? Is it wise to put off that exercise program if good health can mean the difference between life and death (and not just in disaster situations)? The benefits of being prepared in these ways can extend far beyond simply knowing that you are ready should disaster strike, and I hope that we will all (me included) try to be just a little bit more prepared for whatever life may throw at us.

Works Cited

1. Michael S. Abraham, "What if calamity were predictable?" The Roanoke Times, February 1, 2006,  http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/wb/xp-50748.

2. Ali S. Khan, "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse," Public Health Matters Blog, May 16, 2011,  http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/.