Fifty years ago, when my grandparents built their dream house, they included a bonus room, a musty concrete shell under the porch, accessible only from the basement. When kids were around, they called it the “wine cellar,” but the adults knew it by its true name: the bomb shelter.
This was in Washington, D.C. — or, in other words, “Ground Zero — ” at the height of our nation’s atomic anxiety, when schoolchildren were taught to “duck and cover,” and municipalities raced to build enough fallout shelters to preserve the American republic in the event of nuclear war.
Preparedness was a high value for my grandparents, who remembered the deprivations of the Great Depression, and whose cultural DNA was shaped by a millennium of murderous convulsions in the Old Country. They were big believers in taking care of their own, but to them, building a bomb shelter wasn’t a selfish act; it was patriotic. They were doing the same thing the government was doing, just on a domestic scale.
As the Cold War waxed and waned, other existential threats entered the American consciousness. In the Sixties, a period of high inflation, some feared the collapse of the financial system. In the Seventies, it was the oil crisis and increased international competition.
By the late Seventies, a radical movement had emerged, building on the idea of preparedness for national emergency, but taking matters to a new extreme. These were families — and even small communities – who assumed the very worst. They were called, fairly or unfairly, “survivalists.” Their mission wasn’t to ride out a natural or man-made disaster, but instead to ready themselves for the end of civilization.
There’s a fine line between preparedness and paranoia. It’s common sense to assume there’ll be interruptions in the food and water supply; it happens with some regularity in harsh winters and active hurricane seasons. According to FEMA’s disaster preparedness guide, Are You Ready?, which is available for free download at www.ready.gov, citizens should have at least a three day supply of food and water on hand at all times.
That seems reasonable for a garden-variety disaster. But what about another Katrina? Or a regional ice storm that closes roads and takes out power for a couple of weeks?
Fine. So you lay in more bottled water, more canned goods — let’s call it a two-week supply.
Two weeks is pretty good, but a month is better, right? So you head back to Costco, but something occurs to you on the way home: what if your neighbors get wind of your stash? While you’ve been hauling crates of water and stacking cans of tuna, they’ve been guzzling champagne and hot-tubbing. You’ve been an ant; they’ve been grasshoppers. But grasshoppers need to eat, too. Which means you’d better be ready to defend your precious groceries…
As we barrel towards December 31st, 2012, a date with mystical significance for many end-of-the-worlders, there’s been renewed interest in survivalists, or “preppers,” as they call themselves nowadays. The wealthier ones make for good reality TV. No expense is spared in the construction of their luxury bunkers, complete with air filtration systems, generators, six months’ supply of food and water, and, of course, a massive arsenal of guns and ammunition.
In shows like “Doomsday Prepper” and “Doomsday Bunker,” these well-heeled paranoiacs talk about what they’re prepared to do, when the, uh, stuff hits the fan — as they claim it inevitably will. They rehearse pseudo-military maneuvers and take their families to the shooting range to ventilate paper zombies, all in the name of self-defense.
Without any sense of irony, they talk about the future breakdown of society, as if the idea of shooting a neighbor in a crisis, rather than helping him, weren’t a textbook illustration of that very breakdown.
These sad specimens don’t represent typical Americans – or even typical preppers, many of whom simply want to live a healthier, more self-sufficient life “off the grid.”
But they do embody a deeply felt belief, with overtones of religious millenarianism, that our society needs radical transformation. By this way of thinking, a great disaster should be welcomed, not feared, as an opportunity to strip away the weak, leaving only the strong, the planners, the ants. Survival of the fittest!
Of course, we rely on neighbors much more than we’d like to admit, for everything from plumbing to medical care. We may fantasize about shrinking society down to the size of our immediate family, but the truth is that our lives are interconnected, no matter how estranged we may seem.
It’s one thing to prepare for a monster storm. But the end of civilization?
Nothing prepares you for that.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 22 March 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
