I watched it.  I saved them on my DVR, and watched them.  You watched them.  We watched them.  We cri­tiqued each prep­per based on what we have and know.  Admit it.  You secret­ly did.  I know I did.  As the sce­nario was laid out I said, “they need more water, they need more food, they need bet­ter defens­es, they need to cache food and sup­plies on their bug out route(s),” etc.  We all did.  We want­ed to see what the oth­er prep­pers had and what we were miss­ing.  We want­ed to see if we were on the same page.  We want­ed to know we were prep­ping for some­thing that was impor­tant.  We want to be right, in some screwed up roman­tic notion about why we prep.  But I have to ask.  Was “Dooms­day Prep­pers” nec­es­sary?

Here is why I ask.  I’ve watched the episodes.  Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has done a good job try­ing to make sure the show is impar­tial.  They do okay with that.  But, my formed opin­ion is one that I came to after some thought and watch­ing six episodes.  Each episode, as you know, out­lined three prep­pers lives and out­lined the situation(s) they were prep­ping for.  I thought that was cool… Being able to see three prep­pers preps, and lis­ten to why they were doing exact­ly what they were doing.  I thought it could help val­i­date my own prep­ping, (I think we all, as prep­pers, want some val­i­da­tion) and that I might even learn a thing or two.  Well, I learned a few things.  In fact I prob­a­bly picked up a tid­bit or two from each episode.  How­ev­er, I feel a bit like each prep­per was “sen­sa­tion­al­ized” by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic.  Get­ting them dressed up with their AR-15s for the com­mer­cial seg­ments, etc.  I under­stand the need to run drills, etc.  But, after watch­ing all the episodes, I feel that most of these prep­pers lives were dra­ma­tized in a way that might leave a non-prep­per think­ing that they were whacko.  I did not like that.  I’m not going to get into spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tions, nor am I going to point out spe­cif­ic peo­ple that were on the show.  But the video blog­sphere has already had a wave of videos from a vlog­ger that has been to the hos­pi­tal and now his guns have been tak­en away from him by the state in which he resides.  Is this a wave or ram­i­fi­ca­tion of his lifestyle?  I don’t know, how­ev­er, I don’t like it.

Because of this blog, I have been asked to par­tic­i­pate in shows such as The Colony, and oth­er one off pre­pared­ness doc­u­men­taries.  I have only grant­ed two inter­views.  The emails come in the form of a gmail or hot­mail account from a pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that sends a two or three line semi cryp­tic email about doing a spe­cial on prep­pers that is taste­ful and dif­fer­ent from oth­er prep­ping spe­cials.  And, then you get some­thing like Dooms­day Prep­pers that I feel sen­sa­tion­al­ized prep­pers for who they were and led them down the gray line of what made them look like they were sen­si­ble or insane.  Per­son­al­ly, the spin was the lat­er, but that is just my rant and my per­cep­tion.  While I gleaned a few tid­bits of knowl­edge from the episodes, I don’t real­ly think Dooms­day Prep­pers did the pre­pared­ness com­mu­ni­ty any real good.

Let me know what you think…

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