Power's Still On: Apologies and Recriminations

...false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.
-- Mark 13:22, NIV

Folks, Ol' Backwoods has an apology to tender to you, my readers, and this ain't gonna be easy.  I was taken in by the false prophets' fear mongering, and I was wrong.  The power is still on.

You see, I started out my original post on the GridEx 2 grid-down exercise as a

Grid down?  No, thank God.

rundown on what we needed to prepare for a grid-down event, and how GridEx 2 was a good opportunity for us to think that though.  That is the bulk of the post.

As an afterthought, I put a section at the beginning of the post, noting all the coincidences of civil emergency drills in the past that had the bad fortune to "go hot"; that is, an emergency event occured while the drill was happening.  Or, worse, the emergency is intentional, or even a false-flag event to throw suspicion on some other group besides the perps.

As more and more preparedness, survivalism, and to be honest, kook websites started saying that GridEx 2 was in fact going to "go hot", Ol' Backwoods was getting concerned.  With a Google Search, you can turn up hundreds of examples of websites parroting the "GridEx 2 will go hot" line.

Ol' Backwoods was going to have to travel to Noo Yawk during the drill, and going into any of the "Prison States" always gets me antsy, as I must needs go disarmed.   In late October, NatGeo ran "American Blackout", and Ol' Backwoods started to buy into the "going hot" theory.  And got a lot of people scared for nothing.

Ol' Backwoods was wrong, folks.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

And I plan to be a lot more circumspect in the future, focusing more on preparedness as a lifestyle, and not on specific events which may or may not happen.

Tinfoil Hat Time!

But will you get an apology from the likes of Alex Jones, HelpFreeTheEarth,  NoisyRoom, or lesser-known sites like MountainRepublic?   Or the YouTube kooks?  Even some mainstream media sites? I seriously doubt it.  They will just forget all about it, and push on with posting about the next ginned-up "crisis".

There were some Web voices of reason on this drill, like The Survival Podcast (particularly this show),  Prepared Christian and The Government Rag.  The latter site had some words to live by:

Are you ready to fall away from the fake paradigm that we must live every day of our lives with the predictive programming of a new ‘threat’ coming? Does it not seem to you that these ‘perceived’ threats are never-ending? Always moved back to the next month, etc?

 Yes, we need to be prepared to take care of ourselves when the systems of support fail us temporarily.  But freaking out over some rumored 'event' that may or may not happen uses up a lot of emotional energy that is better spent on our loved ones.