They aren’t surprises to the well informed, but that’s just a faction of the people, look at some of the comments already posted on this thread, by people who claim to be conservatives and yet clearly have their head buried in the sand.
Many will fall to what is called Normalcy Bias, a mental state many people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
How many Jews do you think went all the way into the gas chambers never fully realizing what was happening?
There’s a good article about it in my Preparedness Manual, which can be downloaded here for FREE:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, a extra couple changes of oil and filters for your car, tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Or as the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.
NIV Proverbs 22:3
Lastly this for the doubters and the scoffers.
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger.
Underestimation can be fatal.”
The morning hurricane Rita hit, the wind was still blowing and gusting over 50mph. Limbs were still coming down from the trees.
A girl stopped in front of the house and asked if my electricity was back on yet.
She honestly did not have a clue that the power lines she had been driving over is how the power got to her house.
She honestly believed the power came from the post itself.
She also didn't know that gas stations had gas delivered to them. She thought it just came out of the ground.
To this day I'm still dumbfounded as to how ignorant she was and how she was even able to function at all.