Doomsday Preppers?

In the Early 1980s I knew many survivalists. In 1980 I was 32 years old and was married with 3 kids under 10 years old. I looked around at 10% unemployment so I was scared for myself and my family's survival. I had parents and relatives who were doing okay financially but because of what was happening I felt like the U.S. might collapse as part of the ramifications of the Viet Nam War and national indebtedness. But, I was wrong because I didn't understand how dependent the rest of the world was on the U.S. as a leader. We had helped many other countries survive after World War II and had loaned money to them so they could recover since we were the last Big nation that hadn't been attacked on our mainland. It is true we had been hit at Pearl Harbor but if you look back seriously in history most large nations were devastated. Even Russia, though it's infrastructure was intact had lost 20 million people to World War II. That is a lot of population to recover from losing.

Today, people are called "Doomsday Preppers" who in the early 1980s would have been called "Survivalists". There is a movie called:

The Survivors (1983) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0086397/

 Rating: 5.7/10 - 2215 votes

With Walter Matthau, Robin Williams, Jerry Reed, James Wainwright. Having both lost ... The Top Box Office Films Of 1983. a list of 163 ... Videos. The Survivors -- Two unemployed men (Robin Williams and Walter Matthau) find themselves ...
Directed by Michael Ritchie. Starring Walter Matthau, Robin Williams.

Full cast and crew - Memorable quotes - User reviews - Soundtracks

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which is a comedy about the kind of panic people got into in the early 1980s regarding all this.

I think looking back now upon how things were in 1980 and comparing them to now that most of this is about whether you see the world as a Glass half empty or you see the world as a Glass half full, combined with your experiences and whether you feel victimized personally or not by what has happened to you in your life.

For example, in 1980 I had barely survived the 1970s psychologically because of many things that had happened to me since about 1968 or 1969. So, in the early 1980s I was ripe to feel victimized in many ways by what had happened in my life. I wouldn't have said or even thought about it in that way at the time but I have learned a lot about psychology and spirituality since then. So, my reaction was to buy land for my family in a remote forest that I could drive to without electricity and to build us an A-Frame and to home school my children through independent Study through Oak Meadow School which is still online and a really good independent study program nationwide if you are interested.

I figure at the time doing this saved us about $60,000 in rent and utilities over 5 years. We lived a Wilderness kind of experience and when we inherited some money at that time wound up taking our kids to India, Nepal, Thailand and Japan starting in December 1985, and through this experience of 4 months traveling mostly through Nepal and India my whole family sort of became citizens of the world in thought, word and deed.So, when we returned to the U.S. in April 1986  this incredibly expanded our horizons and of how we saw the world and universe and ourselves. This brought us out of any more thinking like Survivalists (at least in the way that we had been). By experiencing India, Nepal, and Thailand and Japan for that length of time and becoming in all our minds (citizens of  the World and of Earth) in addition to being Americans it allowed my children to all become successful as adults in how they viewed themselves and their world. So, the combined experience of home schooling in the woods on independent study and traveling abroad made them all self starters in every way and not victims of anyone anywhere. So, this freed them all up to become a success because they were not limited in their thinking in any way.