Even With This Corona

[Nemo]

virus thing.

Nemo


https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/21/this-is-not-the-end-of-the-world-and-you-are-not-a-prepper/

Home News
This Is Not the End of the World and You Are Not a Prepper
March 21, 2020
in News, Opinion
4 min read

Some years ago, out of a perverse need to both mediate and exacerbate my own anxieties about the climate catastrophe and the threat it posed to the structures undergirding civilization, I got very into consuming doomsday prepper content online. I can’t tell you how many hours I put in watching YouTube videos of burly American men talking about emergency water filtration techniques and what items to put in your long-term wilderness bug-out bag, but I can tell you that it was far too many.

I also spent far too many hours lurking on Reddit forums dedicated to civilizational collapse, reading about the history of millenarian movements, and looking at photos of luxury bunkers for the superrich. My excuse was that it was “research.” At some point I had decided (in retrospect maybe recklessly) that the sensible thing to do with my apocalyptic anxiety was to sublimate it into the writing of a book on the topic, so that in theory all this stuff could be rationalized as work.

I spent three years traveling to places through which I felt the apocalyptic energies of our time could be most effectively channeled: the Chernobyl exclusion zone, for instance; a remote South Dakota prairie where an apocalyptic entrepreneur was setting up a “survival community”; a New Zealand sheep station that Peter Thiel had purchased as a place to retreat to in the event of a global catastrophe.

On some level, all these obsessions of mine — the superrich fleeing on private jets to lavish compounds, people stockpiling food and medication and preparing for the breakdown of societal structures, Elon Musk and his strange insistence on colonizing Mars as a “backup” planet for humanity — seemed like extreme metaphors for the deepest fault lines of Western culture, figurations of the more grotesque excesses of capitalist individualism. On some level, it was all a little abstract.

But now look what’s gone and happened. These themes have suddenly materialized out of the murk of abstraction, and into the harsh light of what for the sake of convenience we must call reality.

At an early stage of my research into the doomsday prepper scene, I bought a book called “Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens,” which I left on a shelf and pretty much forgot about. Earlier today, I found myself taking it down and flicking through its index — “handcranked lanterns”; “pandemic”; “panic, avoidance of” — in a manner that felt remarkably different to how I had flicked through it in the past. The themes and motifs of the prepper movement are having a moment in the mainstream.

Like everyone else, I am finding these new days painful and uncanny. I feel as though I am dreaming a weird and sad dream from which I can’t seem to awaken, a dream in which a mysterious force has hollowed out the substance of human life, where people must keep their distance from each other at all costs. The world feels empty, and strange, and wrong. No matter how much it may seem that way, though, it is not the end of the world. This is just the sort of thing that has always happened to humans. Perhaps the more painful thought is not that we are witness to the end times, but that we are just on the business end of history’s business-as-usual — that we are in no way special.

In the original Greek, the word apocalypse means simply a revelation, an uncovering. And so there is one sense in which these days are truly, literally, apocalyptic. The world itself is being revealed with a startling and surreal clarity. Much of what is being revealed is ugly: the rot of inequality in the bones of our societies, the lethal inefficiency of free-market capitalism, the bewildering cruelty and stupidity of many of the people in positions of apparent leadership. But there are beautiful things, too, being revealed with great clarity and force. Of these, the one that gives me the most hope in this sad and frightening time is that despite the damage done by the presiding ideology of individualism, there remains a determination to act out of a sense of shared purpose.

The doomsday prepper vision of the world is unapologetically bleak: society as a fragile edifice, a thin veneer of behavioral norms over the abyss of greed and violence that is human nature. Among preppers, one of the preferred ways of reacting to a severe crisis is to batten down the hatches and retreat to one’s home, which is lavishly stocked with food and supplies and, in many cases, weapons. This is referred to as “bugging in,” a measure taken to protect oneself and one’s family. There’s an obvious way in which this is precisely what many of us are doing now. But there is also a crucial difference, one that is ethical and deeply political.

Preppers, like the superrich with their plans to fly to secure and remote locations in their private jets, are isolating themselves out of pure self-protection, out of a sense that other people are fundamentally threatening. But this paradigm is completely inverted under the conditions created by the coronavirus pandemic. Those of us who are bugging in, who are keeping a wary distance from each other, are doing so not because we see other people as a threat to be avoided, but because we understand that our fates are inseparable from those of other people.

If and when we get through this, it will be because we came together for the collective good by staying away from each other. Because if there is one thing a viral pandemic reveals, it is that it’s not in our nature to be separate.

Mark O’Connell (@mrkocnnll) is the author of the forthcoming “Notes From an Apocalypse.

[Deathstyle]

This author is a pussy 

[Mustang0268]

"..sailors do not face the unforgiving sea, in ships of hope and good intentions.."

[reconprepper]

This author is a pussy 

Agreed

[patriotman]

LOL wtf is this article. The author is the definition of a beta.

[Nemo]

Probably close on the list to the delta.  In the middle of the end doing nothing but causing problems to flow.

Nemo

[mechmedic]

This event will hopefully be a wake up call for a few people. But most will simply bury their heads in the sand once this is all over. Unless this gets truly bad, it will be a minor blip on the radar screen for most.

[CJS06]

This event will hopefully be a wake up call for a few people. But most will simply bury their heads in the sand once this is all over. Unless this gets truly bad, it will be a minor blip on the radar screen for most.

Sadly you are correct.  Right now this quarantine is a horrible inconvenience for many. They are still instagramming, tweeting and watching nextfix and prime 24/7.  There have been blips of food shortages for a day or so, but most are not going hungry or really struggling in any way.  Unless it gets significantly worse many will overlook the speed and ease in which many state govts suspended their freedoms and how their lack of preparedness would have been exposed had things gotten much worse.

Chris

[JohnyMac]

A couple of thoughts PLEASE fit the  hat firmly on your dome.

With China's GDP diminishing yearly now and the pressure being put on them by Trump, is the Wuhan Virus an attack?
1) Although it seems that all folks agree, the Wuhan virus began in Wuhan City China. There is also a bio-lab in that provence.
2) China look's innocent as they in essence murdered 40,000+ of their citizens in Wuhan City. "look at us...We were hit too."
3) With the focus on the virus around the world, there is nobody looking at China per-say right now. All countries are focused inward.
4) If it appears that the USofA will come through this drama relatively un-scarred, what would China do? Attack our internet? Attack our power grid? Demand repayment of $1T in T-notes? Attack Taiwan? Other?

Going forward look how the media around the world treats China. Then look how American media treats China in reports. Here is a classic. Bruce Alyward spokesperson for the WHO refuses to answer poignant questions from Hong Kong journalist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

Something is going on for sure and unfortunately China is at the root of the situation.

[Jackalope]

    I agree, Johny, there's more to this than we currently know.  On the Fox News website there's mention of a class action suit filed on the behalf of American citizens against China.  It'll be interesting to see where that goes.

    In any case, China should be held responsible.  Even if it was not intentional, Chinese actions allowed the virus to circulate around the world.  Plus, they're trying to take advantage of the situation.  I've been seeing more articles recently that mention that this may be a step of low-grade warfare.   From my experience, the Chinese people in general do not have any type of moral conscience.  The Chinese are predatory to their core, after all, who else would stoop to eating bats, snakes, etc.

[pkveazey]

Trying to hold China responsible might just backfire and leave the US with egg on its face. As I understand it, and this might be total bullshit, Bill Gates supposedly funded the research that created the virus at the University of NC. Then the Chinese Doctors took it back to China and then it got loose.