Yet the way this subculture of disaster-minded Americans has tried to imagine the future-alone and away from people, or away from people with someone-is weirdly resonant in our new norm of “social distancing.” Anton says the prepper community is enamored of the solitary and self-reliant man. Doubling his resources was a goal for this year, along with running a six-minute mile, adding to his ammo stash, and, crucially, meeting someone who will stand by him when shit hits the fan, or SHTF in prepper parlance.įor the time being, the spread of the pandemic complicates the prepper’s search for love. Hence the well-stocked larder, which he guesses would hold him for just about a month. “I never want to be caught off balance like that again,” Anton says. The crisis of being unexpectedly unemployed was an encounter with both his vulnerability as a worker and his isolation as a single man. In his view, there was nothing extreme about his visions of the future-his “preps are practical.” There’s not much you can do to be prepared for an EMP-level catastrophe, he says, unless “you go all in with a bug-out retreat and are ready to survive on your own for however long.” There are more immediate and probable emergencies, he says, like extreme weather, mass contagion, or as he experienced last year, sudden job loss. #DOOMSDAY PREP GUIDE FULL#I was especially interested in how these men go about finding love for the end of the world.Īnton, like others interviewed for this article, agreed to speak on the condition that I not share his full name. I was researching how survivalism appeared to encourage a certain kind of masculinity and offered an uneasy place of refuge for men who felt stripped of agency, entitlement, and security in our rapidly changing society. Whereas I approached the subject of collapse as an intellectual exercise, like parsing the exact timeline of the fall of Rome, they treated it as an inevitability. But if I dwelled in the presumptions flanking the new year, you could say that Anton and the other preppers I spoke to for this article anticipated the new world order. I never-even in the most free-roaming regions of my imagination-fathomed how close I was to regarding the everyday with precipitous nostalgia, let alone to running an ad hoc homeschool for my children or designing a Victory Garden for the front stoop. When I first contacted Anton through an online prepper forum, I was not looking into outbreak awareness, or any other facet of public health readiness. The more likely EMP scenario is that a solar storm, a naturally occurring phenomenon, fries the fragile circuitry of our interconnected systems, resulting in “Hurricane Katrina chaos, on the scale of the whole nation.” In the introduction to the 2009 sci-fi novel, One Second After, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared that an EMP attack is a “very real threat” that would “throw all of our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages.” To Anton, the terrorist angle is overblown. But originally, when Anton began preparing for disaster nearly a decade ago, he was most troubled by the prospect of an EMP-that is, an electromagnetic pulse, or high-intensity energy surge that takes down the grid. He told me then that he was “keeping eye on the virus,” which he regarded as a serious hazard. He has a cache of LifeStraws, a few tactical flashlights, a folding shovel, fifty feet of nylon rope, a tent, a poncho, and a coverall that he calls a pandemic suit.Īnton and I spoke in January, about a week before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global emergency. #DOOMSDAY PREP GUIDE HOW TO#His most recent Amazon acquisition was in support of his latest hobby: The Prepper’s Canning Guide offers instruction on how to “affordably stockpile” in the event that “the disaster drags on for days, weeks, months or even years.”Īpart from food, Anton has a first aid kit he packed himself with guidance from the survival medicine website, Doom and Bloom. Plastic five-gallon water jugs line the back wall of his garage in central Pennsylvania, but he always tries to nab another whenever he goes to Walmart or Home Depot. Anton uses the food dehydrator he bought on Amazon to augment his stores of fruit rollups and assorted jerky.
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