When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

You’ve been watching the news.  You live in a major city and political elections didn’t go the way that a lot of people in your city wanted them to go.  So instead of dealing with things peacefully, some people decide to take to the streets in looting, rioting, and burning buildings.  It’s still a ways from your house, and they seem to be targeting businesses more than residential areas.  But as you watch the news, you see that the crowd is moving in your direction and you’re only a couple of miles away from the frenetic destruction.  You and your spouse get into a conversation (argument) about is it time for you to bug out?  And that is the question – when is the best time for bugging out?

Misconceptions of Bugging Out

I’ve covered this before in another blog post, but it needs to be reiterated that bugging out rarely looks like what most people think it looks.  When we hear “bugging out” we think that we’re going to be walking through the woods with our bug out bags on our backs ‘in search’ of a safer place.  Almost a pictures of life in zombie shows.

I’m glad to burst your bubble, but there are almost no circumstances where bugging out will look like that.  Bugging out takes different forms.  It could be staying over at a friend’s house for the night.  Bugging out, as I talk about later, could be something as simple as taking your whole family to a movie or bowling if you know that whatever is going to happen might only be for a couple of hours.  Bugging out could be staying in a hotel in another part of the city that it quiet.  Unless the dog doo really has hit the cooling device, bugging out will not find you walking through the woods with your family looking for a safe haven.

Do you stay or do you go?

It’s a HARD decision to make!  On one hand if you leave too soon, you risk being a nuisance to friend and family or you end up paying extra money to stay in a hotel so that you can get out of the area.  If you load up too late, you may not get out at all, or you may be woefully unprepared because you waited too late to get everything together.

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?  Five Tips to Help you Decide

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

Tip 1:  Have this conversation with your spouse NOW.

This is NOT a conversation that you want to have with your spouse when you need to make quick life or death decisions.  Ask me how I know.  My husband and I were in that exact situation.  Having lived through the Ferguson Riots, we had multiple times that we had to decide whether or not we would stay or we would go.  There were arguments on more than one occasion.

As a couple ask yourselves the following questions – How close can action (whether a riot or a fire or a or a hurricane) get before you are going to leave?  How bad would the situation have to deteriorate before you left?  Does anyone in your family have extra needs that would cause you to leave earlier (or later)?

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

Tip 2: Ask yourself what are the consequences for either action?

What is the consequence of leaving early?  What is the consequence of staying too long?  Do you know or is it a theory or hypothesis?

When you ask yourself this question make sure that you take the emotional consequences of children into consideration.  One night we didn’t leave, and while the protest ended up in our front yard (with a police helicopter overhead shining its light into our yard) – literally.  Our children saw what was going on from a window.  Our youngest child stopped sleeping in his own bed and started having other physical issues.  We didn’t take the emotional effects on our children into consideration and we weren’t as vigilant as we should have been.

In a case like this, we could even have gone to a movie (with bug out bags in tow) and left the house for an evening.  We would have come back and the kids would be none-the-wiser.

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

Tip 3:  If you truly don’t know what to do. . .

It’s better to bug out too soon than too late.  But…

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

Tip 4:   But you can’t make use of people too often.

When things were looking difficult for us during the midst of the riots, we had some friends in O’Fallon, Missouri who agreed to take us in for a few days.  The problem came in when we were concerned about our family another time.  We didn’t feel like we had the ability to ask this family if we could stay with them again.  We needed to find someone else or to get a hotel room.

The same thing could happen if you live in a hurricane prone area or you too are caught up in riots.  Dangerous events oftentimes either repeat themselves or perpetuate themselves.  You need to plan for contingencies.

When Is the Best Time for Bugging Out?

Tip 5:  Use Social Media to help you make your decision.

During the whole debacle of the riots, we made use of social media and hashtags.  Since Twitter had the most up to the second information, I used Twitter to keep an eye out on where potentially dangerous actions were going on near us.  If we had to leave the area for an event for an evening (life still had to go on during this time) we would check Twitter first to see where the protests were.  We searched #Ferguson to see in which area of town the action was going on.

We had seen videos of people being pulled out of cars and beaten, and we didn’t want that to happen to our children or to us.  Using social media helped us stay safe if we had to leave our home.

So What About You?

Have you lived through a situation during which you had to bug out?  Do you have any other tips for people on how to make the best decision on the timing of leaving their home?  I’d love it if you’d share with us all, so we can all be safer.

You’ve got this, Mama!