“Get a Job”

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Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

Our commitment to living the survivalist lifestyle includes living so far off the beaten path as to make a daily commute to work impractical to say the least. 

And so, in monetary terms, we have been living on just a few hundred dollars a year. 

Someone, not understanding the essence of survivalism, suggested recently that we “get a job.” 

For their sake, as well as anyone else out there who thinks that living a survivalist life means transferring your suburban life to another location, here is my job description and “payment”: 

Rising Voices vs. Raised Voices

Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

Twenty five or so years ago, when we were wading through heaps of hard-copy books on religions, aliens, secret societies and such, there were precious few others who understood – let alone would bother to research – what was going on and where we as a society/culture were going. Basically, people we could talk with about this were few and far between. 

In the past 10 to 15 years, we noticed that the number of people who “get it” began to explode exponentially. This seemed to be the first wave of people who figured out that life as we had become accustomed to it – an affordable house, healthy food, a future for our children – was going to drastically change. The anger brought about by that realization seemed, at least in volume, to spawn a cacophony of Raised voices, displaying displeasure at the government, the system and anyone else who might be at fault for this unwelcome change.

Each shout of anger and hatred has been used right back against this wall of noise by TPTB to make those protesting look silly, uninformed and downright psychotic. It plays right into TPTB's hands, giving them something to cling to, something against which to energize their own forces. They know how to play that game. 

But recently there is a new sound breaking through the din.

Will Enough of Us Refuse?

Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

Living without the bonds of TV affords me the luxury of having time to read. As my third book this month, I happened to pick the Leon Uris novel, QB VII, written in the 1970s, when there was still something to be proud about in America, and when there were still enough people around who could remember the horrors of WWII. 

The story takes place in post-WWII England, and is about a libel suit brought by a Polish Nationalist doctor (Kelno) against a former POW in Jadwiga concentration camp, a Jewish-American author (Cady), who names him as performing surgeries for German doctors who were experimenting on Jewish prisoners.

This is part of the opening statement made by the defense attorney (for Cady) in the British courtroom:

Well, as a matter of fact there were some Germans, soldiers, officers, priests, doctors, and ordinary civilians who refused to obey these orders and said, ‘I am not going to do this because I would not like to live and have this on my conscience. I’m not going to push them into gas chambers, and then say later I was under orders and justify it by saying that they were going to be pushed in by someone anyhow and I can’t stop it and other people will push them more cruelly. Therefore, it’s in their best interest that I shove them in gently.’ You see, the trouble was, not enough of these people refused.¹

When my tears subsided I thought, what an amazing time to be reading this. How appropriate to what is happening in our country now.

What We Gave Up

Anthony Freda Art

Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

America taught the world to be manufacturers. We honored the ingenuity of those who sparked the industrial revolution. We filled our country coast to coast with factories that gave meaningful jobs to the people. People who could feed their families until their bellies were overfull and live in a nice place with the wages they were paid. But we gave it up. 

We gave it up by encouraging the factories to leave America behind to set up in other countries with grand tax incentives for leaving their dedicated employees in the lurch. Gone are the venues of production that gave us a tangible way to dig ourselves out of any economic problem. We allowed it to slip through our fingers until it was no longer available when we needed it. We could have stopped it. We should have stopped it. 

America taught the world to be farmers. The great expanses of arable land within our borders fed many of the hungry of the world. Our reserves of gain kept us assured that we would not starve, and that we could afford to feed our families. But we gave it up. 

The One Most Important Question Survivalists Can Ask Themselves: Why Are You Trying to Survive?

Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

With the news being what it is, the world has now come to the point at which a huge shake-up is undeniable – to anyone who has 2 cents worth of brain matter between their ears. So hordes are joining the stampede to become “survivalists”. The movement has even spurred the development of the “survival industry”, with commercials now being played on mainstream media stations for freeze-dried storage foods and solar generators. 

There is an old saying, “If you don't know where you're going, any road will do.” So if you are going to go the path of being a “survivalist”, first you'll want to know where you are going – and why. 

Plenty of alternative news outlets are trumpeting that “martial law” is soon to be implemented – and the facts they present in support can only lead to that conclusion. So everyone wants to survive martial law. But what is on the other side of the marital law? The reality is that martial law can't go on forever, but what will society/government look like after it has been dismantled? 

Fear Itself

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Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

If we were to pinpoint the one pervasive emotion in society today, it would be fear. People all around you are fearful of almost everything. They fear the police. They fear the IRS, ATF, TSA and all the other “alphabet police”. They fear losing their job. They fear loosing their house. They fear their city or town government. And they fear the mother of them all – fear of continuing life without enough money to maintain their current lifestyle (or at least the one the remember from a decade ago). Most people rationalize these fears as normal because “everyone has them”. 

We are trained from a very early age to act out of fear. We fear our teachers wrath, so we do our homework. We fear clergymen, for they decide if we go to heaven or hell, so we say all the right prayers. We fear older children who may bully us so we cross the street to avoid them. Later on in life we fear the cost and hassle of a ticket, so we fasten our seatbelts. We fear losing our house so we work in a job that means nothing, offers us no personal satisfaction other than just enough money to keep us trying to reach the carrot on the stick. 

Try this experiment . . .

Confusing Money for Value

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Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors

You should have seen us when we wore Rolexes, big diamonds and the latest fashions. You should have seen our 3000 sq. ft. house that required a full-time housekeeper and gardeners, not to mention the electric, phone and water bills. You should have seen my long, weekly manicured fingernails and perfectly coiffed hair. You should have seen the Cadillacs we drove. It was the image of monetary wealth – unfortunately, all too often confused with real value.

You wouldn't have known we were people who could be happy in a one-bedroom cinderblock house in which we must keep a fire going in order to stay warm. That is, of course, unless you chose to look under the surface. All that opulence never impressed us, even though it was never bought on credit but with money we had worked our buns off to make. It was just a tool we used to get ourselves to our goal – a self-sufficient, off-grid survivalist retreat. 

Our first house in the wilderness was a 16' by 32' plywood shack, finished only well enough to be livable, not aesthetically pleasing. It didn't take much of our funds and we chose not to put a lot of money into it at the time. We knew we were going to build another someday (it happened a mere 2 years later). But that plywood shack had VALUE. It kept us warm and protected from the weather and gave us the freedom to finish other projects. 

Home Grown Humanity


The following is an excerpt from our book, Surviving Survivalism – How to Avoid Survivalism Culture Shock, available on Amazon Kindle or survivingsurvivalism.com. (Note: We asked our 21-year-old son, Jesse, if he would contribute to this book by writing about his viewpoint of living this life. Here are his words.)

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Jesse Gendron

I was recently asked “ Do you know how lucky you are never having been vaccinated?” 

The question gave me pause because it had become an invariable expectation to encounter those attached to the ball and chain of the corporate world who would of course look down on anyone not suffering among them – misery loves company. You are somehow repugnant to them if you show justifiable fear of the clutches of their world. To be reminded by an external source that you have made the right decision can be a relief, as world events should make abundantly clear soon enough. 

We (as in society) make it too easy for those trying to control the majority of the population. For the most part we already control each other. We attempt to make small changes in our lives to constructively avert control, and the controllers need not do anything that our peers won't execute more promptly for them. 

Survival Reading – Books for the Summer Book Bag

Gaye Levy, Contributor
Activist Post

For many of us, summer is a time when we fill up the book bag and head to the mountains or the beach for a little R&R. This year, why not add some survival reading materials to the book bag?

Over the past few months, I have acquired a number of books relating to prepping and survival. Some I have read and others are still in the queue. Alas, it is my intent to put up reviews on all of them, but until I gather my somewhat scattered wits about me, I thought I would provide you with a list so that you can pick and choose for yourself.

All-Time Darwin Award: The Nuclear Industry

Rady Ananda

Gar Smith’s Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth is a 14-point condemnation of President Eisenhower’s “peaceful atom,” an exposé of official and corporate lies, and a multi-pronged platform of alternatives.

When Ike okayed nuclear power, “they screwed the pooch,” says political cartoonist Mike DiBari. Ike’s military-industrial complex wrote our death sentence when the US authorized the development of nuclear energy: humanity will not survive this technology, nor will most other species.

“In 2000 alone, civilian reactors produced enough plutonium to make more than 34,000 nuclear bombs,” writes Smith. [1]

This is what the nuclear energy industry is about – producing plutonium, tritium and other ingredients for nuclear bombs. [2]