Open Letter to Michigan Preppers Network

Michigan. God how I love this state. As I sit and write this it is a beautiful Saturday morning. Michigan and Michigan State will both be playing football as well as lots of other state schools. The warm afternoons and bright blue sky will have the squirrels and rabbits moving about the woods preparing for winter. Fish are slowly working their way to deeper waters in our lakes and rivers but a mess of them can still be caught. This is the time of year that you see folks finishing collecting the goods from their gardens and working late canning and preserving for the coming winter. Farmers are looking at the crops trying to judge the best time to harvest for the best yield. If you watch people you will see a lot of them look up into the deep blue September sky. It is unspoken when they do, but they all know that those cloudless skies are a foretelling of the coming winter.

A lot of people in our great state are prepping and yet they are not “preppers” as we know them. It is part of growing up here; it is part of the rural work ethic and part of the fabric of our heritage. Take a drive out in the very rural areas of the state, out were the villages are small and the farms are large. Look at the farms as you go by. See the gas tanks sitting by the outbuildings? See the large gardens? See those three guys, looks like a dad and two sons in blaze orange vests and shotguns headed out for a hunt? How about those stacks of firewood, do you see them? Looking at those items from a prepper’s point of view the case could be made that every farmer in the state is a prepper. In some respects that is true, but only to the point that we have that prepping heritage. (Yes, I know this same heritage applies to most Midwestern states as well.)

The weekend on several blogs seems to be the time to reflect on what you did for prepping that week. It makes you stay focused on your long term goals and makes you think about the short term action needed to reach those goals. You are forced to ask yourself if you did anything to help yourself reach that state of independence we all strive for.

So with all these thoughts I ask myself one question. Why is it that with a network of preppers and multitude of items and skills that go into prepping the Michigan Preppers Network has only had two postings since the 30^th of April! Are we not willing to share ideas, not willing to talk about our goals, hopes dreams and plans of action to reach those goals?

I readily admit to being a lurker on this site. Before this site started I have been writing on several of the other sites and stayed with the ones I had been with. I figured that I might try my hand at a contribution or two down the road, but I wanted to see the tenor of the site tone before I did. Appears to me the site is tone deaf.

Information is the life’s blood of anything. For prepping we all need to have those short notes that remind us that there is a great way to freeze rabbits for later, or that Jay’s has shotgun shell on sale dirt cheap or that the DNR has a warning on deer harvested in Montmorency County. (Examples only folks) The exchange of ideas creates synergy, a multiplying of knowledge. Each thought helps build on the next until problems can be solved and things accomplished.

Ok, the dirty little secret is that most of us have a Michigan public school education and are not thrilled with the idea of writing. That is ok. We will all promise to not make fun of anyone that hits the wrong key or doesn’t use spell check. You do not have to be a great writer to share information and contribute. Beside, give the editor a chance to do some work cleaning stuff up.

When I started writing for the other blogs I used the pen name Wolverine not for the football team, although I am a fan, or some comic book character, but rather because I am from the grand and glorious sovereign state of the Wolverine, /Michigan//!/ I am proud of this state, warts and all and Lord knows she has some serious warts right now. Maybe those are even more reason to make sure we share information with each other. Come on people, let’s start using this site and help each other. If everyone that reads this site were to write just one short article we would be able to help each other many fold.

Later,

Wolverine