I watched early as COVID-19 began to spread. I read the patents from the USA, Canada and Australia a month before media began to really get the fear train rolling forward about China. I checked my food supplies, I went to the bug out cabin and stocked up and got some annual work done early. I ordered medical supplies and more stores of food that I thought would be needed. I researched virology and decided that while COVID-19 does have some alarming characteristics and unusual (code for engineered) genomes, it is still just a viral pneumonia. One that is going to be portrayed as the new black death.
I was ready two months before the fear began to take hold. As a man, soldier and father, all the same thing really, it is your job to think of the things that could have a negative impact on your family, prepare for them, train and educate yourself and gently prep your family for the possibilities. Women simply do not handle things the way we do and everything is a joke until it isn’t. Even my wife lightly laughed it off nervously when I brought up our contingencies two months ago and she was a career medic in the Army herself. Can’t train the female out of a female. Never once was the conversation about COVID, but the fear chaos. Here we are today, fear is spreading with the help of the media and political oligarchy and no one in my town is ready for the shortages, the price increases or the restrictions but my family. And we will not be here. We are going to the cabin on back country land to take a break from the engineered chaos. We will grow a garden, hunt, fish, train, shoot, relax, rest and enjoy the peace of forty miles to the nearest paved road. We will likely stay two months after the panic has subsided and never have a financial or resource worry. I planned for this and many other silly games governments play. I even scheduled a minor nerve cluster surgery to have my recovery in peace.
Did I do this because I was afraid? Did I do this because I enjoy modern prepping? Or did I just determine accurately the relationship between two or more factors over an unknown period of time? Planning and preparing for stressful through to dangerous scenarios was my profession, and is still my responsibility as a Male. I still laugh, joke, work, read and write, study and learn, spend time with the young and educate my children. The difference is I was prepared because I understood the nature of fear. Once it takes hold of a group it changes the social structure of priorities. A dog that is cowardly will take strength once in a group on a hunt. An individual that shows self control can allow it to be degraded in large groups under pressure if untrained. Fear infects. All living things feel fear, it is natural and needed. However, anticipation is worse than the event. We are in the anticipation stage of the very slightly more than normal nature of respiratory viral infectivity (gain) of COVID-19. Influenza kills 600k people per year, pneumonia somewhere around 200k, if sources are close to accurate. COVID has about 2-15k deaths and is leveling off in phase one outbreak. Phase two is nine months after phase one apex and is always more severe. What will people say then?
COVID-19 is a tactic. Can the populace still be easily manipulated? Can prices, borders, policy and freedom still be altered at will? Will people give up their rights for “safety”? Of course they will. Consider the following:
SARS 2004
Avian 2008
Swine 2010
MERS 2012
Ebola 2014
Zika 2016
Ebola 2018
Corona 2020
What do all of these timelines have in common? Large political elections that will have an impact on the entire global economy. Policy changes that can either restrict or release inherent natural rights of the people of the world. Easy to anticipate. The political games played today are no different than were played in Rome. The same. The same characters, the same tactics, the same economics and the same mob of plebeians and proles.
History is repeating, a platitude in our culture, but true evermore often and predictably. Be ready for fear to be the weapon and you are already ahead of the game. If you are fighting for resources when things go poorly, you deserve it. If you are ready to take a vacation and keep your family away from the fear and political angles, you deserve that too. When fear takes hold of the mob, protect your family and your brothers from fear and they will do the same for their families years from now.
You decide what you are worth and you get exactly what you decide.
Something I tell my four children everyday of their lives.