afloweroutofstone:

procrasimnation:

procrasimnation:

procrasimnation:

I’m watching Doomsday Preppers. These people have an unbelievably bleak view of humanity, like, I’m just saying my family survived the complete disintegration of Lebanese civil society without shanking their neighbours for water or stockpiling hand grenades.

If your reaction to a foreseen future economic collapse is to set traps and stockpile guns to kill your neighbours who want some of your huge food stock, you are broken and I have no idea how to fix you.

Shout out to Bruce in episode 8 who is building a shelter for his local community including an area specifically for children and thinks too many Preppers focus on personal survival instead of reconstructing communities. Bruce isn’t broken. Just kooky.

Rachel Riederer, “Doomsday Goes Mainstream,” Dissent, Spring 2018:

“There is something fundamentally conservative in the prepper impulse: to create a stockpile in one’s basement rather than work toward a system that could help ensure community-wide safety. Embedded in the prepper ethos is a deep distrust of public systems, fueled by the belief that we’re one cataclysm away from a Hobbesian state of unrestrained every-man-for-himself (and-his-family) competition…

Of course, the nightmare SHTF [shit hits the fan] situations these new preppers imagine are already happening—to people whose wealth and status don’t protect them. Low-income individuals and communities of color are far more vulnerable to the consequences of the natural and political disasters we are all already living through. New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward remained desolate and stripped of services for years after Hurricane Katrina; armed men knocking on doors and stopping cars of people trying to escape dangerous weather at checkpoints is already a reality for undocumented people in the United States.

Disaster preparation doesn’t have to be a purely private undertaking that happens at the family or individual level. During the early 1960s, landlords took part in what the New York Times called a “fallout shelter drive.” The Army Corps of Engineers identified over 17,000 buildings across the city, which they “equipped with federally provided survival kits—costing roughly $2.40 per person—that featured aspirin, toilet paper, tongue depressors, appetite-suppressing hard candies and ‘Civil Defense Survival Rations,’ i.e., animal crackerlike biscuits.” No champagne or artisanal chocolate here, but the program provided enough space to accommodate nearly 12 million New Yorkers.

Preppers’ doomsday scenarios typically hinge on an acute, almost cinematic event—the city floods, the bomb goes off, the virus mutates. The crisis is unambiguous, a clear moment at which the old world falls away and it’s time to batten the hatches or set off in the mobile hive. What they don’t seem to prepare for is the slow creep of social and economic precarity, the erosion of niceties and norms, the sea level inching higher so slowly your feet are wet before you realize you ought to have packed a bag.”