They call themselves 'preppers.' They are regular
people with homes and families. But like the survivalists that came
before them, they're preparing for the worst.
PHOTOS
Give Me Shelter
A look at survivalist housing through the years--from air-raid bunkers to panic rooms
By Jessica Bennett | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Dec 28, 2009
Lisa Bedford is what you'd imagine of a
stereotypical soccer mom. She drives a white Tahoe SUV. An American
flag flies outside her suburban Phoenix home. She sells Pampered Chef
kitchen tools and likes to bake. Bedford and her husband have two young
children, four dogs, and go to church on Sunday.
But about a year ago, Bedford's homemaking skills
went into overdrive. She began stockpiling canned food, and converted a
spare bedroom into a giant storage facility. The trunk of each of her
family's cars got its own 72-hour emergency kit—giant Tupperware
containers full of iodine, beef jerky, emergency blankets, and even a
blood-clotting agent designed for the battle-wounded. Bedford started
thinking about an escape plan in case her family needed to leave in a
hurry, and she and her husband set aside packed suitcases and cash.
Then, for the first time in her life, Bedford
went to a gun range and shot a .22 handgun. Now she regularly takes her
two young children, 7 and 10, to target practice. "Over the last two
years, I started feeling more and more unsettled about everything I was
seeing, and I started thinking, 'What if we were in the same boat?'"
says Bedford, 49.
Bedford is what you might call a modern-day survivalist—or, as she describes it, a "prepper." Far from the stereotype of survivalists past, she owns no camouflage, and she doesn't believe that 2012—the final year of the Mayan calendar—will
be the end of the world. She likes modern luxuries (makeup, air
conditioning, going out to eat), and she's no doomsayer. But like the
rest of us, Bedford watched as the housing bubble burst and the economy
collapsed. She has friends who've lost their homes, jobs, and 401(k)s.
She remembers Hurricane Katrina,
and wonders how the government might respond to the next big disaster,
or a global pandemic. And though she hopes for the best—the last thing
she wants is for something bad to happen—she's decided to prepare her
family for the worst. "We never set out to go build a bunker to protect
ourselves from nuclear fallout;
I have no idea how to camp in the wild," Bedford says, laughing. "But
as all of this stuff started hitting closer to home, we [wanted] to
take some steps to safeguard ourselves."
They call themselves 'preppers.' They are regular people with homes
and families. But like the survivalists that came before them, they're
preparing for the worst.
In the past, survivalists and conspiracy
theorists might go out into the woods, live out of a bunker, waiting
(or sometimes hoping) for the apocalypse to hit. It was men, mostly;
many of them antigovernment, often portrayed by the media as radicals
of the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. In the late 1990s, Y2K fears brought survivalism
to the mainstream, only to usher it back out again when disaster didn't
strike. (Suddenly, unused survival gear began showing up in classifieds
and on eBay.)
A decade later, "preppers" are what you might call survivalism's Third
Wave: regular people with jobs and homes whose are increasingly fearful
about the future—their paranoia compounded by 24-hour cable news.
"Between the media and the Internet, many people have built up a sense
that there's this calamity out there that needs to be avoided," says
Art Markman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Texas who
studies the way people think. And while they may not envision
themselves as Kevin Costner in Waterworld—in
fact, many preppers go out of their way to avoid the stereotypes that
come along with the "survivalist" label—they've made a clear-eyed
calculation about the risks at hand and aren't waiting around for
anybody else to fix them. "I consider it more of a reaction than a
movement," says Tom Martin, a 32-year-old Idaho truck driver who is the founder of the American Preppers Network,
which receives some 5,000 visitors to its Web site each day. "There are
so many variables and potential disasters out there, being a prepper is
just a reaction to that potential."
That reaction, of course, means different things to different people. Some prep for economic disaster,
while others prep to escape genetically modified foods. An organic
farmer could be considered a prepper; so might an urban gardener. Some
preppers fear putting their names out in public—they don't want every
desperate soul knocking down their door in the event of a
disaster—while others see it as a network they can rely upon were
something horrible to happen. Some preppers fear the complete breakdown
of society, while others simply want to stock up on extra granola bars
and lighter fluid in case of a blackout or a storm. Hard-core
survivalists might think of preppers as soft; "Eventually, the Chef Boyardee is going to run out," jokes Cody Lundin, the founder of the Aboriginal Living Skills School, a survival camp
based out of his home in Prescott, Az. But prepping, says Martin, is
just a new word for a very old way of life. "You don't have to have a
survival retreat loaded with guns secluded in the wilderness to be a
prepper," adds David Hill Sr., 54, a former jet mechanic who runs the
Web site WhatisaPrepper
from his home in rural West Virginia. "There are many people who live
in urban and suburban areas who don't own guns who also identify
themselves as preppers."
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