Hoarding or Prepping?

If you have more than 4 pairs of shoes, are you hoarding shoes? If you have a 401k, are you hoarding money? If I have 2 packages of TP, am I hoarding TP? If you have a freezer full of meat, are you hoarding food? 2 freezers? One huge walk in freezer? At what point are you “hoarding”? Answer: Irrelevant. Accumulating, stockpiling, collecting, saving, preparing. Those are HEALTHY things. Profiteering is not. Profiteering is the act of gathering needed resources and selling them at an obscene profit to people who need them enough to be willing to pay obscene amounts of money, or other forms of trade.

“Prepping” is PREPARING for contingencies. Sometimes that takes the form of gathering a sufficient quantity of food and storing it. No one else gets to determine what “sufficient” is, either, that’s up to the person doing the planning and preparing. Prepping is not done last minute, when resources are low. It is done over time, and takes NOTHING away from the community. Stockpiling anything in times of plenty is smart, and in fact takes a burden away from the community in times of scarcity. If 10% of your community can adequately take care of themselves, that’s more resources for the rest of the community, and TAKES NOTHING AWAY FROM THEM. And it is not a prepper’s responsibility to share, they are already helping by removing them, their family, and their close friends from consuming community resources. It is the community’s responsibility to share what taxpayers have provided, not the other way around.

Prepping and militias are not the same. Some militias, or members of militias are also preppers, some preppers are also in militias, much like some preppers are also accountants, and some militia members secretly play with Barbie Dolls.

Guns and ammunition are sometimes part of a preppers’ preparations. Sometimes they aren’t. When you see someone who is a prepper and also had 30 firearms and a large amount of ammunition, understand that one person can only shoot so many guns at a time. 30 firearms does not make one person 30 times more dangerous. Perhaps that person is a collector, or perhaps that person plans on using those firearms as trade goods, or even to help local law enforcement when times are tough. Perhaps that person just likes them and wants them. As I said before, it’s irrelevant. I could collect LP tanks from barbecue grills. Maybe I have 30 of them. Maybe those could be used for bombs, or for helping the community kitchen cook during times of emergency. Point is, none of your business, a prepper has plans for what he or she or they prep. We already know what someone with 30 pressure cookers could do… but I get it, guns are scary to those unfamiliar with them, but to those of us who know, there’s plenty more to be worried about.

During 2020 especially, preppers got a bad rap because of profiteers. Two different things, but you know, the media, and social media, like nothing better than to demonize people who are better off than they are because they made smarter choices. Only this time, we’re not talking about billionaires or Hollywood types, we’re talking about average people who took the time and care to prepare ahead of time.

Also, I’m not sure why the word hoarding is still being used when hoarding is a legitimate psychological condition and people suffer greatly from it. Not at all the same as prepping.