Sunday, April 22, 2012

Movies that Inspire Preparedness

Fiction, in most all its different forms, including movies, has played a big role in inspiring me (and just to be clear by "inspiring me", I mostly mean scaring the crap out of me) to try and make preparations for possible emergency situations, such as: natural disaster, nuclear war, economic collapse, zombie apocalypse and plain old regular apocalypse. I would have to say that Red Dawn is the movie that "inspired" my first preparations. I was ten at the time, tensions with Saddam Hussein were playing out in the news, I watched Red Dawn and promptly gathered bunch of canned goods from my mother's cupboard, a flashlight from wherever, went to my room, called all my friends and warned them of possible nuclear war. Yeah. My friends were pretty scared. But to me, at the time, nuclear war meant, above all, no school, so the threat of it sort of excited me, but also made me want to affect seriousness, which for me was manifested in a pile of borrowed canned goods on my floor. To tell you the truth, my methods have evolved only in the slightest, and of course, the idea of nuclear war is not so exciting now, but the vestiges of the Cold War intrigue me to this day.

The next movie that really built on my apocalyptic notions was the Road Warrior. You see, in The Road Warrior, there are no Russians to fear, the very vague war has been had and society has collapsed in it's wake. Max, has lost it all, survives for the sake of it, but still has some decency left in him. I love that film. It's just good cinema.

Now, let's talk about the film which has inspired my more recent attempts at preparedness. The Road. That movie is frightening. Very well done and not at all fun. It is based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy (he also wrote No Country For Old Men, and if you've seen the Coen Brothers film adaptation of that then you understand his stuff is "juuust a tad dark") It stars Vigo Mortensen and some kid. I am not sure what exactly has caused the break down of the world in this one, but I think they mention something about what humans have done to the earth, nuclear war probably, anyway the earth is dying and with it the plants and animals. Humans, canned goods, and the rare 11 year old Coca Cola are all that's left to eat/drink. How horrid. The next day I ordered a basic emergency kit for the car. You have to start somewhere.

So, what I really want to know is, what movies have inspired you to prepare?

Friday, April 20, 2012

Introduction:

Hi, My name is Christian, and I am a wannabe preparedness girl. I fantasize about being prepared. A lot of my day dreams are never realized and that's probably a good thing, but I thought that I would share my preparedness dreams on this blog. I hope to share some of my actualizations, as well. Oooh, and my survival pins, too. This is gonna be fun :) or, at least a lot more fun, than the apocalypse.