08:21 – Winston-Salem had our first Ferguson protest yesterday. It was peaceful and uneventful, although protesters did block a couple of downtown streets for a short time. There was no violence and no property damage. Protesters ignored police orders to clear the streets and move to the sidewalks, but no arrests were made. As Barbara said, the protesters were simply exercising their Constitutional right to peaceable assembly. I do wish they wouldn’t block streets. The Constitution guarantees them the right to protest; it doesn’t give them the right to force anyone else to listen, and it certainly doesn’t give them the right to inconvenience others.
I did a Google search yesterday for local prepping groups. There’s apparently a fair amount of activity. One meet-up group based in Walkertown, just down the road from us, has 225 members. Since preppers tend not to be joiners, that tells me there must be many thousands of active preppers locally.
Interestingly, a year ago a local TV station tried to get members of that group to agree to be interviewed on camera. All but one of them declined, and the one that did volunteer to be interviewed didn’t give away any details of his own preps during the interview. So they did a short interview with him, and then talked with a business owner over in High Point who sells $80,000 steel bunkers designed to be buried 20 feet underground. At one point, they asked her what her customers looked like and how they dressed, apparently expecting her to say that they all wore body armor and camo BDUs and carried assault rifles. She said they wore jeans and t-shirts and drove normal SUVs and minivans, just like anyone else.