SOME THOUGHTS ON PREPPING

Back in the 1950s, fallout shelters were all the rage. There were TV programs about them, serious discussions on political shows, newspaper and magazine articles and probably books (I was reading the Hardy Boys and Tarzan at the time, so I have no recollection of How to Build a Fallout Shelter, go figure…)

Back then, the threat of atomic war was pretty serious. It was something that Boomers and their parents thought about often. It was, in fact, the 10-mega ton gorilla sitting on the couch. We had faith in Eisenhower and later Kennedy to protect us from being atomized in an unfriendly exchange of missiles and during the Cuban Missile Crisis that faith was really, truly and honestly put to the test.

Back then, people with underground bunkers didn’t seem so odd. Well, okay, my father thought they were nuts, but he was a stoic and pragmatic man who was not about to dig a hole in our backyard and plant a fallout shelter unless there was a darned good reason. I think, for my father, a darned good reason would be confirmation that Russian missiles had launched. Other folks were less skeptical and built functional shelters filled with food and water and other supplies to survive the atomic/nuclear holocaust.

Today, people are burrowing underground for “a smorgasbord of end-of-the-world scenarios.” They are preparing for super-volcanoes (since lava is liquefied rock and will seek the course of least resistance, won’t the lava flow into the bunker? And if not, won’t the cooling lava cover the bunker opening, thus creating a tomb? Just asking…), meteor hits – not this year, folks – electromagnetic radiation (unlikely), plagues, an economic collapse of biblical proportions and all the rest.

People who build underground bunkers these days seem to each have their own Doomsday du jour scenario.

So while preparing for a disaster is prudent – three days supply of food and water – preparing for Armageddon may be a tad overboard. 

Maybe I’m wrong. But, you know, all this time and energy preparing for Doomsday seems to be a kind of game unto itself. Some people are bird watchers, some are stamp collectors and others are Armageddon aficionados. It’s all good, until someone somewhere goes crazy and decides that Armageddon is NOW and begins committing heinous and horrible acts. If a bird watcher goes crazy, he scares away all the birds and if a stamp collector goes crazy, he might lick himself to death (unlikely, but an interesting visual); however, if a prepper goes crazy…well, that worries me more than an economic meltdown or an electromagnetic storm.