Doomsday Preppers Are “Socially Selfish – Preparing Themselves and the Hell With Everyone Else”

Rebuttal: Doomsday Preppers are Socially Selfish

This Friday morning I was sad to discover an article on emergency management.com in the “Disaster Academia” section entitled Doomsday Preppers are Socially Selfish. It amazes me how someone in emergency management that claims through her “academic” title to be intelligent fails to grasp how preppers actually contribute to safer communities.

Both federal, state, and local emergency management agencies, as well as NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) like the Red Cross constantly educate the public on the need to have basic preparedness kits to be able to take care of themselves until the emergency response resources can be organized and distributed. The CERT program (community emergency response teams) is a federal/state program with a proven track record. The program takes citizens with an interest in disaster response/emergency preparedness and provides training in urban search and rescue, first aid, and other vital response skills. The goal of this emergency management program is to reduce the load on “professional” responders by using trained citizens based in their own communities. No one is better suited for CERT than preppers.

Ms. Valerie Lucus-McEwen goes on to say:

You might wonder why someone like me, who has been in the business of encouraging disaster preparedness for a very long time, is so critical of people who are doing just that. It’s because they are being socially selfish – preparing themselves and the hell with everyone else. Instead of spending time and energy making changes that would benefit the larger community, in their very narrow focus of loyalty they are more concerned about themselves. Read more.....