Dealing

Things are not great right now. Our economy is at best floundering and will take several years for a full recovery and at worst, well I hope you have bullets, beans and bandaids. I think it is important to keep a sense of perspective and a positive attitude. First of all Americans, even 'poor' Americans are rich by world standards. If you can turn on a faucet and have all the clean water you want you are rich and most of us can do that (the ones who can't have chosen not to for whatever reason). Seriously we all have our wants and struggles but we have it pretty darn good. Attitude is just so darn important. A person who ends up in a bad situation with a good attitude and the willingness to move forward and deal with the new reality is always better off. There are numerous cases of people who are well prepared and essentially die of giving up and other cases of people who are in horrible situations and get through almost exclusively on good attitude and willingness to do what must be done. For Americans and most likely other folks it is really hard to accept reality and a change in standard of living or life patterns. Unfortunately the idea that you cannot have a 'middle class' lifestyle is tantamount to accepting defeat and failure as a person. I encourage you to ignore what other people think. Other people are poor and have seriously skewed values.

Also I think it is important to remember that broad trends are made up of a very large amount of individuals. I think we are facing an overall drop in quality of life of the American middle class. Call it whatever you want, inflation, market cycles, changes in labor patterns, depression, etc but it seems to be the situation. I urge you to work to either move against this trend or at least mitigate its effects on you and your family. Just because there is an overall 20% decline in standard of living doesn't mean it has to happen to you. Or in a more extreme case if most people lose everything and you just lose something you are better off. I think it makes sense to work along both traditional lines of effort such as good financial choices, increasing your earning power, etc as well as more preparedness oriented ones like tangible stores of wealth, primative and survival skills, alpha stragegy type purchases and the 3 B's. In the real world your finances and other boring stuff are almost surely more important for your ability to deal with realistic situations then the kind of semi automatic rifle you choose, the bullets that are in your handgun or whatever.