One of the things I’ve been looking into in my spare time is getting the perfect one hour bread recipe. The internet is full of them. Not many actually work though. In fact, just a few days ago I tried a new one and had high hopes for it. In the end, I had a hot, fresh, steaming cinder block. Not anting to waste it, I figured I could chuck it into the dehydrator and grind it down to breadcrumbs. Just to make sure I could do it without the help of electricity, I hauled out the manual food processer thingy I had tucked in a cupboard.
About a half hour later, I just had to give up on the idea. Sure, I could find a way to dehydrate the failed bread attempt without electricity, but I want to be able to process food without power too. It was an exercise in failure. Not my first and likely not my last, but hey that’s how we learn right?
This got me thinking though. It’s easy enough to read up on just about any skill set these days. In fact, you can learn all the theory, familiarize yourself with the required tools or equipment, even purchasing them is easy online these days. The problem is, even with all that research, there is no substitute for doing…even failing.
While doing the things is a smart idea, we must all start out by learning the things. The internet is a great resource for preppers, well it used to be anyways. What were once great resources of skills and ideas, have become soap boxes for all sorts of opinions. Most of the prepper bloggers, You Tubers, Podcasters, et al, have all but abandoned the idea of teaching what they know. Perhaps they have themselves run out of skills to pass on. More than likely they have tuned into the idea that people are passionate with their opinions and therefore easy to engage on controversial subject matter.
This is the number one reason that so many online resources of skillsets have become a swamp of political and ideological rhetoric. Where once there was a great source of information about food storage, now dwells some angry person ranting about censorship. Where there was once a level headed approach to energy generation, there is now nothing more than warnings of impending civil war.
I once subscribed to what was supposed to be an up and coming preparedness themed You Tube channel. There were three videos at the beginning about gardening. The third one was little more than a bit of footage showing a flooded out garden patch…completely destroyed by seasonal rains. That was the last video I saw on that channel where the presenter was not firmly seated in a chair ranting about whatever evil was certainly now lingering around the corner.
Now, I’m not saying that a little background info or opinion is completely unwelcomed. On blogger I follow once spent several paragraphs explaining how she thought global warming was impacting the environment in a way that affected her growing season and how she would need to make some changes as there was no indication that these trends would stop. She then went on for several articles talking about what changes were made to the farm, and actually showed the results…both good and bad.
So as preppers, we can do two things. We can either sit in front of our favorite online device listening to rants and raves about this or that, or we can seek out new skills and actually get off our butts and acquire those skills. If we choose to learn new things and actually further our preparedness skill sets then we end up furthering our goals. If we get comfortable listening to some person who has the same political or social axe to grind that we do, then we’re just gonna get lazy and fat.
In the end, we must stop encouraging the talkers, and start paying a lot more attention to the doers. Support the teachers and ignore the preachers.
