1d ago

How are my fellow Americans preparing for the upcoming apocalypse?

I've got quite a lot of rice and beans saved up, and some canned goods and I'm a mechanic by trade, 2nd least likely to die in an Apocalypse scenario, 1st being Doctors, of course.

I'm rural and have running water just a short walk from the property if the well stops pumping and I've got an old revolver with a few rounds in case I feel like checking-out early.

You guys?

102 comments

I am screaming into a pillow at the image of Americans prepping for the apocalypse while doing zero things to avoid it.
Look, I've said this a bunch of times around here this week and it seems like I'm trolling, but I'm not. I've been spooked for years at finding out that my US friends were absolutely unwilling to engage in any political action but were also consistently sure that a violent revolution or uprising was both inevitable and imminent. The idea that this is a widespread societal thing and that not only has it not been altered by another wave of trumpism but has in fact been reinforced is absolutely wild.
I don't know who convinced Americans that they are simultaneously the sole main characters of life but also absolutely absent of any agency or responsibility over what happens, but holy crap, they did an amazing job.
- The Conservative Propaganda Machine.
- Extremely well put. The individualism really is weird and terrible. The main character syndrome is part of what takes away the agency, I think... Like, we need to hear The Call To Adventure. We need The Plot to show up at our fucking house. We need to be The Person that Does The Thing in the Room Where It Happens. The Founding Father. It's all or nothing. Either the thing we personally do somehow fixes the country, or we don't do it at all.
  Maybe we imagine that we can be the hero and shoot the bad guy and save the day. But we can't imagine, like, Fixing Things. Deciding what the future holds. What would that even look like? Boldly waving a parchment in the air? When would everybody cheer for me in particular?
  No, it doesn't look like an individual. It looks like a crowd. It looks like people, outside, angry. I hope enough people see that in time.
  Cheers to Good Trouble.
- As an American, I'm glad others have noticed this, too. We could be building community and supporting one another, but it's not even on anyone's roadmap. Our hyper-individualistic society has turned into pure toxicity and inability to organize in any meaningful or helpful way. It's pretty maddening that I know a bunch of people that want to buy guns, but almost nobody that wants to start a community garden.
  Also see my comment here for more context.
  
  Yeah, I grew up in an area of survival agriculture, removed from actual famine by say twenty, thirty years, depending on how you count it ending. Living memory in any case. To this day people here will pester you to take food when they have a fruit tree yielding, or when they are picking potatoes. People get together to go pick grapes across all of their small properties and then roughly split the yield based on plot size, even if the yields were somewhat uneven. Friends would show up with fish when they went fishing and you'd do the same.
  You want to prep for the apocalypse, start giving away food and insisting that neighbors come over to visit, then force feed them aggressively, even under protest. Then do that to such an extent it becomes deeply culturally ingrained.
  Will you have a culture where your adult children can't bear to throw anything away and will perpetually eat leftovers but never stop overcooking? Yes, you will. But you will have learned to survive scarcity.
  But in the meantime, holy shit, get out of the house and start protesting. Have you seen what your government is doing? At least have the decency to lose whatever conflict leads into the apocalyse instead of just sitting there complaining about it on social media.
  
  The thing about protesting is that the government needs to give a shit for it to have any effect, unless we're talking about actually forcefully changing who is running that government. We've been screaming at concrete buildings for decades and yet none of the issues we care about are dealt with. In good times we have propagandists to placate the masses even if we had a government who was afraid of losing voters, and in "bad" times well we still have propagandists, but we also have a government that couldn't possibly care less about what we think. I still protest, have gone to many rallies and such, and while the feeling of community is nice at the end of the day all I feel like I ever accomplished was yelling at a building with a bunch of other people.
  The only way this administration is changing direction is when the wealthy go after them :(
  
  For the record, this is more like it.
  I mean, still like a 6/10 by either belligerent European or pissed off Middle Eastern standards, but keep it up a few months and we can work with that.
  
  Yeah, this would be the "lacking any agency or responsibility" part of the bafflement about Americans' views.
  Get a few million people out on the streets (and/or refusing to work) and it turns out it is remarkably hard to run a country at all.
  Americans think of protesting as a small circle of people in front of some building chanting corny slogans. It is not. Look at France. Look at Serbia. Look at Turkey right now, FFS.
  I'm not saying go be a weirdo chanting in a circle, I'm saying block the streets with masses of people, shut down the country, close down the shops, picket official buildings, cordon off vulnerable targets, blot out the goddamn sun.
  You have done nothing as a country yet. The dumbass MAGA morons did more direct political action on Jan 6th than anybody else in the US since, what? BLM? I am astounded at the sense of dejection and powerlessness in the face of fascist ascendancy paired with some weird ritualistic economic self-immolation. You guys are SO. WEIRD. I don't get it.
  
  we could be building a community
  Homie, I live in North Carolina.
  Any worry whatsoever about the future is met with "God will take care of me."
  well, okay...
  
  I get what you're saying, but I also know there are plenty of left-leaning people in North Carolina. Some areas more than others, but I've lived in those kinds of towns--those people are always still there, just quiet.
  
  That's the wild thing. My friend has space for a community garden, and I spent a couple months after the election trying to plan out one large enough for our queer family. But no one besides her wanted to put the work in. One of the younger people said they didn't think this presidency would be that bad. I'm in the middle of moving to a new city, but I've transitioned to having a wall of garden plants so I can share what little I can grow that way.
  The denial is so strong among some people

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