You ever watch those documentaries on Nat Geo and The History Channel? You know the ones I'm talking about. They're less creepy than TLC's documentaries (read: "The Virgin Diaries" scarred me for life) and much more informative. The past few years there have been a bunch on the end of the world and since network TV sucks nowadays (doesn't that make me sound old? "Back in my day, tv was actually good!" [removes dentures and lies down for afternoon nap]), I tend to get sucked into these specials. I'm sure the number of these docs will only increase since we're only ten months away (get excited!) from the supposed End of Days.
I caught the last half of a show about people prepping for The End and found it...comical. This particular episode of was about a chick in her twenties who lives in Houston and was trying to pass herself off as a hardcore "prepper", as they call themselves. Her plan: When it all comes down, she was going to hunker down in her apartment for two weeks, where she had food and water to last (first mistake: she only had cans of like veggies, no protein). Then, she was going to leave under cover of darkness with a backpack of her stuff and a bunch of guns and ammo and head to a car she'd hidden. After that, she would drive to Mexico. Yes, Mexico. Because there's NO crime there now so of course there will be none when the world goes mad. Some sort of doomsday experts rated her plans and watched her do a run through of her procedure. Her walk from her apartment to her car, that she estimated would take 4 hours at most, took 6 hours and she barely made it. The experts told her that her car wouldn't even hold enough gas to get her to Mexico and she said she was banking on being able to barter with people along the way to get more gas. That is leaving an awful lot up in the air and essentially putting your survival in the hands of other people. People who will not be thinking rationally because they will be trying to save their own lives. The so-called experts told her she was not prepared but she thought she would be just fine. Two months later they checked in on her and she'd enlisted in the Marines, I'm thinking because she turned on the news and realized Mexico is already a war zone and will only get worse when the end is here. Plus, it meant she no longer had to prep for anything. (The scariest part of this chick is that she has two cats and told the camera that, when the time comes, she'll just put one of her guns to each of their brain stems and kill them because they won't be "useful". And she said all this while holding one of them and petting it. Fucked. Up.)
Look people, if the world is going to end then the world is going to end. And if it is a cataclysmic event like the asteroid that contributed to the demise of dinosaurs or a solar flare (which is due to happen later this year), then no amount of guns and ammunition or bunker in an undisclosed location in the woods is going to save you. Sorry to be a downer. But if the end is as devastating as has been predicted, then the world as we know it is a goner and you'd have to be in your bunker for decades and, most likely, hundreds or thousands of years. You can't stockpile that much food. I don't even think there is that much food in the world. And that's the best case scenario. Still, you'd eventually die just like everybody else, except you'd die of thirst or starvation or maybe your bunker mates would go cannibal and eat you. But you're still gonna die. So all that preparation was for nothing anyway. On the other hand, there are people who seem to think the world could never end. There were some people interviewed on one of these specials about how they think the world will end and they scoffed at the notion that it could even happen. But everything that begins eventually ends and the world is no exception. But maybe those people just don't want to believe it, which is understandable. Ignorance is bliss sometimes. And there is no sense in living in fear about it. Or spending the better part of your life preparing for something that might not even happen. But people will do what people will do I guess.
[Written from my bunker in the woods, located in an undisclosed location. ;p]
