This borrowed shamelessly from Doug Carmichaels site

For discussion purposes only

===============QUICKIE COMMUNITY PREPARATION Knute Berry

I am not downplaying any possibilities.

In Bakersfield, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, our goal was to get them to start preparing. If we can get them from learning to acting the quickest, that is what we want.

We deal with a lot of task forces you do not know about. When we check back, they have not started. We have found that they are emotionally paralyzed. It is an impossible task. They shut down.

In the last 3 - 4 weeks, we have tried something new. We have recently come to use the message "Expect hiccups in the systems over the next couple of years".

We say you should store several months of the supplies that you can store. They say "I can do that." and start preparing immediately.

We were shocked. We do not need to use the long scrolls or lists. We threw them away.

Substitute basic lists. (Say "Dry, nonperishable food" rather than giving a list of such foods.) Since we are in the food industry, we know that they are preparing, and can see their orders. With the folks who are beginning, we encourage them to prepare more.

They can mentally manage this. Go for the short term. Is a couple of months, enough? No. But it's better to have many folks partially prepared, than some well prepared and most not at all.

It does not matter what could have happened. We do not describe scenarios. We keep it simple and general.

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I will try this with some of my GI friends who are still putting off getting anything done.

-- LM (latemarch@usa.net), November 28, 1999

Answers

Tell them to check at their local emerg. shelter. Mine has no heat and when I tried to round up heaters I was shot out of the water. I could not get any support from the township,ema,or county gov. Check out your emerg. shelter for preparadness;you may be unpleasantly suprised. Solar flares,causing geomagnetic flucuations,major ice storms-ask canada and upstate N.Y. not to mention 1 Jan 2000 may require emerg assistance/shelter! I am basically prepared.

-- uncle charlie (cthomas@pathway.net), November 28, 1999.

Hi LateMarch, that would have been cheery news about a year ago. But... er... a few months supply? It's 29-Nov-1999. At the community level, that's just going to clear out the local distributors and create pre-rollover panic.

My thinking is that it might be better to just leave the DGI's in peace so that if things DO go wrong post-rollover, then at least everyone is in the same boat. If you DO succeed in creating a climate of hoarding (or prepping, it's just semantics) at this late date, then my worry is that there will be a lot of angry, scared people out there BEFORE the real problems hit.

Let Joe sleep for now. He might be in a better mood when/if he's forced to wake up.

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 29, 1999.

Colin,

Only trying to get a couple just GI's to move off of dead center. You know the paralysis of to much to do and not enough time so where do I start?

Buy some "nonperishable food". This would appear to make them think just enough and then act as it is a simple project.

Like I said will try it on some of my new GI friends and see.

Not trying to save the whole community, probably to late for that.

-- LM (latemarch@usa.net), November 29, 1999.