This is a habit I got myself into a long time ago. It’s a fairly simple principle – if you do at LEAST one small thing to prep every single day, it will all add up very quickly! Following this principle, I make sure that every day I’ve done something to prep. It might be as simple as fill a 2 liter bottle with water or doing a quick visual inventory and making a mental checklist of what I need to pick up at the store soon. Other (funner) days it’s something much more complex like stocking up on medical supplies, buying another gas can, filling it and putting it with the others.
These little things not only add up, but as you keep the thought in your mind, you will find yourself seeing opportunities to do something prep related. If you’re at the grocery store, a great deal on a prep item might catch your eye or you might notice a cheap lighter and grab one, etc. In my case, there have been times when I’ve noticed a pile of gallon jugs that had just been emptied of their distilled water – that little catch has resulted in over 150 gallons of water being stored because it was a free, renewable source of jugs! If I hadn’t been thinking about prepping when I saw them, I probably wouldn’t have made made the prep connection and grabbed them.
Today I was thinking about the potential loss of the internet, and many books. I was reminded of an episode of Sliders – an old sci-fi show where the characters ‘slid’ into parallel universes where some small thing would have been different resulting in a huge change or impact. In the episode I was thinking about today, they slid into a world that was being taken over by communists. There was a massive underground resistance underway and people were willingly sacrificing themselves to protect the data contained on a small disk. As the characters joined the resistance they learned the contents of the disk – it contained the last known copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The communists wanted it destroyed because of the ideas it would plant in the minds of the citizens. The characters in the episode were willing to die to protect it.
This got me thinking – those documents are the most important things we would need if we found ourselves in a
position that required us to re-establish our Government, or where we are in a remnant community that has survived The Event. In a TEOTWAWKI situation, where are we going to find such things? What preps have I (we) made to ensure that we have those vital and God-Inspired documents to guide us in re-establishing a government?
I realized that *I* haven’t done anything to try to preserve them. I decided it was time for me to locate copies of the original documents and transcriptions of them as well. After doing some Googling and a bit of research, I found everything I was looking for. I took the transcriptions of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Amendments 11 – 27 and put them all in one big document (for easy printing). I also found facsimiles of the original docs and individual transcriptions of each of them. Later today, copies of those files will go on both of my Bug Out Drives – 16 gig EMP proof flash drives – that have all of my critical data on them – one for my wife to carry and one for me.
I’ll probably do more later today, but so far that is what I have done to Prep today.
How do you feel about an individual responsibility to preserve copies of our framing/founding documents?
Here are links to the files I found:
Excellent Docs. If you have an iPhone, or iPod Touch, check out the ‘Declaration’ and ‘Constitution’ apps from the store. They are free, and provide an easy way to read these, plus view the facsimile right on your device.
Excellent Docs. If you have an iPhone, or iPod Touch, check out the ‘Declaration’ and ‘Constitution’ apps from the store. They are free, and provide an easy way to read these, plus view the facsimile right on your device.