Defining a Mutual Assistance Group (MAG)

My preferred term is Mutual Assistance Group or MAG, but there are many terms out there.  Due to popular television programs, the term “prepper” has people’s eyes rolling and you can almost see them backpedalling away from conversations with you.  Most people think of preppers as a crack pot fringe of the tinfoil hat crowd.  As much as I dislike the modern habit of making up cute sounding labels for things, perhaps we should re-label ourselves.  Emergency Preparedness has been a part of my life for a few years now and I think that pretty well describes my “preps”.  National Geographic’s program “Doomsday Preppers” paints preppers as having a single idea of an all-or-nothing extinction level disaster.  I don’t know what is going to happen first.  There are so many things out there that could bring us down that it is really just a horse race.  Many things that can crash our way of life are not permanent either.  Even if the dollar crashes and our beloved country ceases to be a cohesive nation, I think it would likely be a temporary reboot.

At first, government programs would take care of people while simultaneously taking more control over the daily lives of those needing aid.  Once the aid runs out, and it will for any number of reasons, the people receiving no more assistance will rebel, probably violently.  This will stress local law enforcement resources and federal troops will be needed.  This will involve a wider tightening of the federal screws.  I think this is when the gun grabbing is going to ramp up to a door-to-door effort.  This will subdue most of the population for a short time, but sooner or later, the troops performing this function will either get word from home or figure out on their own that the same thing is happening where they are from.  You can’t blame a soldier for leaving his post to save his family regardless of the consequences to himself.

This is also when things begin to get seriously out of hand for society.  The hungry are going to prey upon their neighbors first, but it will only take a few days of deprivation before middle-income households need to be prepared to defend their families and homes.  I expect that after a few weeks, most of the open violence will die back, to be replaced by the stench of decay given off by the bodies of looters hanging from lamp posts at the edge of neighborhoods to warn others of the cost of bad manners.  I do not call this lynching because in the absence of a functional law and courts system, communities have a right to establish order including extreme methods.

As communities regain some semblance of normalcy, they will seek trade relations with neighboring communities because even if a community can be self-sustaining, we all crave things that we can’t make ourselves.  These communities might just be neighborhood associations, mutual assistance groups, hard-core prepper compounds, or small towns.  I wish I could see a way a larger city could re-organize in the absence of federal aid because it has been so long since a city stood on its own in America.  Eventually the regions will re-form state governments and at some point a nation will be born (hopefully it will be the United States of America again one day).

I have heard very few statistics on how many people are preparing for emergencies, let alone prolonged interruptions in public services.  My guess is there are fewer than three percent who have a month’s worth of food in the house and a means of preparing it.  As a Christian, I am not able to simply board up my house and crouch inside until things get back to normal.  Those who are unprepared include family members I love.  As a Christian, I must feed the hungry and especially the children.  These are not bad people.  They have been lied to by the mainstream media for so long that they believe this carnival could never end.  I don’t blame politicians as much as some people, because they are our employees.  Even the dreamers just shrug and smile while admitting that they are all liars.  We are all complicit in this catastrophe, but the media was always supposed to keep us informed.  The press is the reason the first amendment protects free speech.

I may be way off base here, but I see there being at least two distinct types of Mutual Assistance Groups (MAG’s).  

On the one hand, you have geographically close people. This type of group needs some specific rules of day to day conduct to maintain operational security and a command structure or other method for making decisions as a group. This type of group needs to be planning how their community is going to survive an uncertain future by sharing responsibility to varying degrees as an essentially closed community.  These run the gamut from families that go into ownership of retreat property together and share in the development costs and responsibilities to hardened compounds.  In this type of community it is vital to have a well-established organizational structure or chain of command.  The core philosophy of these groups seems to be; “We are prepared and the rest of the world can go to hades once things get bad”.

On the other hand you have a group with a common cause and goals, but whose locations are spread over a wider area. The area might be as small as a neighborhood or a small town.  Some of these support groups probably span the nation over the Internet.  One defining element of these communities is that members live in and around non-preppers.  Their neighbors may not all share a common political viewpoint.  Many of the neighbors will only have a day or two worth of food and water saved with no means of taking care of themselves in the event of an emergency.

Such a group might best spend their time sharing information and ideas with like-minded peers. I think most of us have friends and family who get that glazed look on their faces when you mention the possibility of society reforming in a dramatic and catastrophic way. When I toss an idea out here, I am really looking for someone to say; "That isn't going to work because you have forgotten to take this or that into consideration". Then I can go back to the drawing board or perhaps the person has a suggestion on how to correct my lapse.

One thing I am not seeing anywhere is consideration of what we do about the ninety seven or more households between each pair of preppers.  There is strength in numbers which is why our founding fathers said; “If we do not hang together, we shall hang separately”.  We are never going to be able to convince many people to be prepared for an emergency.  Even if you win the lottery, it is doubtful you could lay in enough supplies to prepare for everyone in your vicinity.  Therefore, I don’t think storing supplies alone is a viable answer.  

If anyone with an American identity is to have a chance at living to see the other side of what is coming, we need to think about sustainability.  We need to be tossing scenarios around on how to bring our neighbors together in the first days of a collapse, before hunger and violence set in.  We must also develop strategies for convincing skeptics surrounding us that heading toward the “false light” of a FEMA camp is not solving their problems.  If we get a handle on things quickly enough, there is no reason for the local stores to be looted which wastes more resources than it distributes.

A community like this needs to have some sort of governance since every decision cannot be made by mass-vote.  It needs to have laws regarding behavior.  Citizen obligations of time, (since money will likely have less meaning for quite some time) needs to be considered.  How are new citizens chosen? All of these things should be ready to go, but you need the ability to present it in such a way that the community accepts the ideas or modifies them to suit the majority.

This article has no answers, but perhaps it asks a question for which we should all pursue an answer.