These Last Days News - March 25, 2026
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Skills All Preppers Should Be Learning Today Before Something Devastating Happens...

PROVISIONS
"How many shall be prepared? Do you have your candles? Do you have your water, your canned food, and your blankets? It will become an extremely cold day with the start of the tribulation, and you will welcome having these on hand, My children." - Jesus, November 1, 1985

STARVATION
"My child, you will see that the Message goes throughout the world. Do not be slowed down in your endeavors by scoffers, those who say there will not be a Third World War. Are they God? Oh, no, they will know what it is to see blackened bodies along the roadside, their children, stomachs distended with starvation. 'This cannot happen here in the United States,' I hear voices saying. O My children, it will! Your crops will rot.” - Our Lady of the Roses, May 28, 1983

The above Messages from Our Lady were given to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York. Read more

Discern.TV reported on March 25, 2026:

By Daniel Corvell

There is a peculiar arrogance embedded in modern American life — the assumption that the lights will always come back on, that the pharmacy will always be stocked, that the grocery store shelves will always be full, and that a repairman is only a Google search away. We have outsourced virtually every competency our grandparents possessed to a complex web of systems, services, and supply chains that most of us couldn’t begin to explain, let alone sustain. We have become, in the precise and damning sense of the word, helpless. Not by nature, but by design — by the seductive convenience of modernity.

And modernity is fragile.

The 2021 Texas winter storm didn’t care that millions of people had no idea how to survive without electricity. A prolonged cyberattack on the power grid wouldn’t pause for anyone who assumed their water would always run hot. A pandemic, an economic collapse, an EMP event, a cascading infrastructure failure — these are not fever dreams of paranoid hermits. They are documented historical patterns playing out on new stages. What separates the person who endures from the one who perishes in those moments is rarely gear alone. It is knowledge. It is skill. It is the capacity to act when every familiar support system has gone dark.

The internet is the greatest library in the history of human civilization. You can learn to suture a wound, identify edible plants, tan a hide, build a solar generator, or speak Morse code — all for free, right now. But that library depends on the same infrastructure you’re trying to learn to live without. The window to acquire these skills using the tools that make them easiest to learn may be shorter than any of us would like to admit. What follows is not a hobbyist’s checklist. It is a serious reckoning with what it means to be genuinely self-sufficient in a world that could, without much warning at all, stop providing for you.

Medicine Without a Doctor

Of all the comforts modernity has given us, none is more deeply assumed than pharmaceutical medicine. We take pills for blood pressure, for infection, for pain, for anxiety — often without the slightest understanding of what alternatives existed before the corner CVS. Should those supply chains fracture, a routine infection could become a death sentence for those who haven’t prepared accordingly.

This is where herbal and natural medicine stops being a quaint hobby and becomes a survival discipline. For centuries before synthetic pharmaceuticals, human beings managed illness through plant medicine — and much of what they used has since been validated by modern research. Garlic (Allium sativum) has well-documented antimicrobial properties. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) has been used for millennia to staunch bleeding and reduce fever. Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) has demonstrated antiviral properties in clinical studies. Plantain leaf — the common “weed” you’ve probably been pulling out of your lawn — draws out infection and speeds wound healing. Usnea lichen, known as Old Man’s Beard, has been called “nature’s antibiotic” for its strong antimicrobial properties.

The prepper’s natural medicine cabinet should include working knowledge of:

Wound care: Beyond bandaging, you need to understand which plants serve as natural antiseptics. Raw honey — particularly Manuka — has been used clinically for wound dressing. Calendula makes an effective healing salve. A poultice of comfrey or plantain can draw out infection and reduce swelling. Knowing how to pack and dress a wound under pressure, without sterile hospital supplies, is a skill that saves lives.

Infection and fever: Echinacea and elderberry can help stimulate immune response during early illness. Willow bark contains salicin — the precursor to aspirin — and can be made into a tea for fever and pain relief. Learning to make tinctures (alcohol-based herbal extracts), infused oils, and decoctions (boiled plant medicines) means you can produce remedies from plants you’ve grown or foraged rather than depending on a supply chain.

Respiratory illness: Thyme and mullein have both demonstrated effectiveness as expectorants. A simple steam inhalation with eucalyptus can provide meaningful relief in respiratory infection. Knowing how to make a chest-clearing herbal steam is not folk nonsense — it is practical medicine that will matter greatly when the nearest emergency room is inaccessible.

Pain management: St. John’s Wort has been extensively studied for mild to moderate pain and nerve pain. Clove oil has been used for centuries as a topical analgesic, particularly for dental pain — a condition that becomes acutely serious in a world without dentists.

Beyond plant medicine, every serious prepper should pursue formal wilderness first aid certification. Courses offered through organizations like NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) or Wilderness Medical Associates teach you to manage trauma, fractures, dislocations, wound closure, and shock in austere environments without access to hospitals. A basic knowledge of CPR is table stakes. Knowing how to recognize signs of sepsis, how to improvise a tourniquet, how to manage a sucking chest wound, or how to reduce a dislocated shoulder — these are the skills that turn panic into action.

The Book of Proverbs says: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished” (Proverbs 22:3, KJV). It was true three thousand years ago. It is just as true now. The prudent man has a medicine chest that doesn’t depend on FedEx.

Food from the Land, Not the Store

The modern American has become so detached from food production that most children cannot name the plant a carrot grows on. We have reduced “food literacy” to knowing which aisle holds the canned goods. In a grid-down world, that kind of ignorance is dangerous.

There are two parallel tracks every prepper should pursue: foraging and cultivation.

Foraging for wild edibles is among the oldest human skills and one of the most perishable — because almost no one practices it anymore. The critical point that any honest guide must make at the outset is this: only roughly 5–10 percent of all wild plants are edible. The rest are either indigestible, unpalatable, or lethally toxic. Enthusiasm without knowledge is not just useless here — it is fatal. Elderberries and water hemlock can look similar to the untrained eye, and water hemlock is among the most violently toxic plants in North America.

That said, once learned, foraging transforms the landscape around you from inert scenery into a living pantry. Dandelions — despised by every suburban HOA — are entirely edible from root to flower and are rich in vitamins A, C, and K. Cattails, found near virtually any body of freshwater, have been called the “supermarket of the swamp” because every part of the plant — root, shoot, pollen head — is edible depending on the season. Wild garlic mustard, wood sorrel, lamb’s quarter, stinging nettles (once blanched), wild ramps, acorns (leached of tannins), and a vast variety of berries and nuts offer nutritional sustenance to those who know what they’re looking at.

The proper way to learn foraging is not by reading a single article or downloading an app. It is by going out with an experienced forager, plant by plant, in your specific bioregion, and building identification knowledge through repeated, confirmed observation. Purchase a high-quality regional field guide — the Peterson Field Guides series and the regional “Medicinal Plants” series (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest) are excellent resources. Learn the edible plants in your county before you need to rely on them. Know their toxic look-alikes. Know which parts are edible and which are not. Know which require cooking and which can be eaten raw.

Gardening and food production are the longer game. A kitchen garden that produces tomatoes and zucchini in the summer is a start. But survival gardening demands more: understanding how to save seeds (crucial, since hybrid seeds don’t reproduce true to type), how to extend growing seasons, how to compost and maintain soil fertility without synthetic fertilizers, and how to grow calorie-dense staples like beans, squash, potatoes, and corn alongside nutritionally rich greens and herbs. Learn your USDA hardiness zone. Know your last frost date. Know which crops can be stored through winter without electricity — root cellaring is its own discipline and an extraordinarily valuable one.

Hunting, fishing, and trapping round out the protein column. A hunting license is cheap. The skill it licenses is priceless. More preppers should be learning to track game, read wildlife sign, field dress and butcher large animals, and preserve meat through smoking, salting, and curing — without refrigeration. Fishing remains one of the most calorie-efficient forms of wild food procurement available. Learning to set fish traps and snares for small game multiplies your capacity for food acquisition dramatically, particularly when you cannot afford to expend all your energy on active pursuit.

Food preservation is the bridge between abundance and survival. Our ancestors understood this intuitively — they canned, fermented, smoked, dried, and pickled not as a hobby but as a necessity. Water-bath canning and pressure canning are learnable skills with a modest upfront investment in equipment. Fermentation — making sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, and lacto-fermented vegetables — requires nothing more than salt, water, and a clean jar. Dehydrating food for long-term storage extends shelf life dramatically. Learning to smoke and salt meat preserves protein when you have a surplus and no refrigeration. These are not lost arts — they are just temporarily unfashionable.

Water: The First and Hardest Problem

A human being can survive roughly three weeks without food. Without clean water, you have three days, and they will be miserable ones. This makes water procurement and purification the single most non-negotiable skill set in any prepper’s repertoire.

Municipal water supply depends on electricity for pumping and treatment. When the grid goes down, so does reliable municipal water — often within hours. Every prepper should understand multiple methods of water purification: boiling (the most reliable, kills virtually all pathogens), chemical treatment with iodine or chlorine tablets, mechanical filtration (gravity filters like the Berkey are excellent for base camp use; the LifeStraw and Sawyer Squeeze for personal, portable use), and UV purification (effective but battery-dependent).

Beyond purification, water sourcing is its own discipline. Rainwater harvesting — setting up barrels under roof downspouts — is legal in most states and provides a meaningful supplement. Knowing where every natural water source within a ten-mile radius of your home is located is basic operational awareness. Understanding how to read terrain to find water (look for vegetation, valleys, drainage patterns) is more advanced but learnable. Understanding how to dig a seep well or how to extract water from vegetation in dry conditions is the outer edge of the skill set — and worth knowing.

Mechanical and Trade Skills: The New Aristocracy

In the economy that follows civilization’s disruption, the person who can fix things will be among the wealthiest people alive. The person who can only consume them will be desperate.

Consider how completely we have abandoned the mechanical arts. The average American cannot change their own oil, replace a broken window pane, wire a light switch, fix a leaking pipe, or sharpen a hand saw. We call someone. We order it on Amazon. We let the warranty handle it. All of those options disappear the moment the infrastructure that supports them goes dark.

Geopolitical turmoil has prompted price hikes for long-term storage survival food. Heaven’s Harvest is the exception because their all-American food is sourced locally. Use promo code “Patriot” for a nice discount today!

Basic automotive mechanics is a starting point. Understanding how an internal combustion engine works, how to do a tune-up, replace belts and hoses, fix a flat, diagnose basic electrical problems, and maintain a fuel system could mean the difference between mobility and being stranded. In a prolonged crisis, older vehicles — those without complex computerized systems — will be more valuable than newer ones, because they can be repaired with hand tools by someone who knows what they’re doing.

Carpentry and basic construction become essential when you need to repair or fortify shelter. Knowing how to frame a wall, install a door, patch a roof, build raised garden beds, or construct a root cellar is not just practical — it is leverage. The person with these skills will be in demand in any community trying to rebuild.

Plumbing and electrical basics — understanding how your home’s water supply and drainage system works, how to shut off water at the main, how to replace a fixture, how to wire a simple circuit or install solar panels — make you capable of maintaining a habitable home without calling a professional.

Blacksmithing and metalworking are longer-term skills that reward serious investment. The ability to fabricate and repair tools from raw steel is, in a truly extended collapse scenario, foundational to any community’s capacity to function.

Sewing and textile repair seem mundane until you consider that in a world without manufactured clothing supply chains, the person who can make and repair garments from raw material — or even just mend what exists — provides an extraordinarily valuable service. Learning to sew buttons, patch tears, reinforce seams, and eventually construct basic garments by hand is not optional in a prolonged crisis.

Gunsmithing basics deserve mention here as well. Firearms are the prepper’s primary tool of defense and a critical hunting implement. Understanding basic cleaning, maintenance, jam clearing, and common repairs — and, for the advanced, handloading your own ammunition — is the difference between a weapon that functions reliably and a club.

Fire, Shelter, and Navigation: The Ancient Basics

It would be easy in a long article on practical skills to breeze past what every wilderness survival instructor knows are the true fundamentals. They deserve serious attention.

Fire craft is more complex than it appears. Starting a fire with a Bic lighter is trivially easy. Starting one in wet conditions, at high altitude, without modern fire-starting tools, using materials you have gathered from your environment — that requires practice. Every prepper should be proficient with a ferrocerium rod, should understand the principles of tinder preparation, fire lay construction, and fire management for both cooking and warmth. Fire starting is a perishable skill — meaning it degrades with disuse. Practice it regularly.

Shelter construction — knowing how to build an effective improvised shelter from natural materials — addresses the immediate threat of exposure, which kills far faster than starvation. Understanding the principles of insulation, moisture management, wind protection, and ground insulation allows a person to survive nights in conditions that would otherwise be lethal.

Land navigation without GPS is a skill that has been nearly exterminated by the smartphone. The GPS signal can be jammed, can fail, can run out of battery. Map reading — the ability to interpret topographic maps, understand contour lines, identify terrain features, and correlate what you see on a map with what you see on the ground — combined with compass use, including declination adjustment and triangulation, is fundamental. This is not a difficult skill to learn. It simply requires investment and practice. Navigating by the stars — celestial navigation — is a deeper skill that requires more study but provides complete independence from any manufactured technology.

Communication When the Grid Is Gone

In a communications blackout, information is power — and the person with a working radio that can send and receive across distance holds enormous community value.

Ham radio — amateur radio — is the prepper’s communication answer. With over 750,000 licensed operators in the United States and six million worldwide, the amateur radio network is genuinely robust, and the equipment is increasingly affordable and capable. A Technician class license from the FCC requires roughly ten hours of study and opens access to regional VHF and UHF networks. A General class license opens HF (shortwave) frequencies and enables communication over continental distances — the ability to reach operators hundreds or thousands of miles away without any internet or cellular infrastructure.

The important thing about ham radio is that it must be practiced regularly to be useful in crisis. Many preppers purchase a radio and let it sit in a drawer. This is nearly useless. Getting licensed, joining local emergency preparedness nets, practicing the equipment, and learning how to operate under field conditions — including solar-powered charging of equipment — turns a radio purchase into a genuine capability.

Beyond ham, every prepper should understand how to signal for help without electronics: signal mirrors, ground-to-air signals, whistle codes, and the basics of Morse code. These are durable skills that require no battery.

The Psychological Dimension

No skills list is complete without acknowledging the dimension that determines whether all other skills can actually be deployed: mental resilience. The statistics from wilderness survival emergencies are sobering. People with more gear and more theoretical knowledge than their rescuers have died because they panicked, made poor decisions under stress, and could not tolerate uncertainty.

Mental fortitude — the capacity to remain calm in the face of genuine danger, to prioritize clearly when everything is wrong, to tolerate discomfort without becoming paralyzed, and to lead others when leadership is desperately needed — is itself a learnable and practicable skill. Meditation, deliberate exposure to discomfort (cold showers, fasting, difficult physical training), scenario planning and mental rehearsal, and the cultivation of what military psychologists call “stress inoculation” — these are not soft concerns. They are the operating system on which every other skill runs.

Community is equally critical. The lone wolf prepper is a Hollywood invention. Real resilience in crisis has always been communal. Know your neighbors. Build relationships with people who have complementary skills. Understand how to negotiate, de-escalate conflict, and maintain social cohesion under pressure. The ability to build and maintain trust in a community that must cooperate to survive is itself one of the most valuable skills on this entire list.

The Window Is Open — For Now

We live in an extraordinary moment. Every skill described in this article can be learned through free YouTube videos, downloadable PDFs, online courses, and community workshops — right now, today. The knowledge of centuries has been digitized and made accessible. The herbs our great-grandmothers used, the construction techniques that built this civilization, the navigation methods that opened continents — all of it is available for the learning.

That window is only open because the grid is still running.

This is the irony the casual observer misses: the very technology that might one day fail us is, right now, the most powerful tool we have for preparing to live without it. Every hour spent learning to start a fire from friction, to identify plantain and yarrow and elderberry in the field, to suture a wound, to read a topographic map, to operate a ham radio, to preserve a harvest — every one of those hours is an investment that cannot be repossessed, cannot be jammed, cannot be taken down by a cyberattack. Skills live in the body and the mind. They do not require a signal.

The American tradition of self-reliance — the frontier ethic that shaped this nation’s character — was never just philosophy. It was practice. It was the daily engagement with the real world that produced competent, capable, adaptive human beings. The progressive project has spent a century building systems that replace that competence with dependence. The irony is exquisite: the more we have been taught to trust “the experts,” the systems, the government agencies, the supply chains — the more catastrophically helpless we become when any of those fail.

The old wisdom is not obsolete. It is waiting. And the time to retrieve it is now, while the internet still works, while the courses are still accessible, while the seeds can still be ordered online and delivered to your door. Lay up wisdom as a man lays up provisions: before the storm, not during it. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” counseled Solomon; “consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest” (Proverbs 6:6–8, KJV).

The ant does not wait to see the storm. It works while the season is good.

So should we.

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