It's Okay If You're Never Ready for The Collapse of Civilization

According to FEMA, you’re supposed to store at least two weeks of nonperishable food for every person in your house, in case of emergencies.

I’m not sure what kind of living situation FEMA envisions for 80 percent of humanity, but my marriage started out in a studio apartment. We were thrilled to have a stackable washer-dryer in a utility closet. It was a first for us, after spending our 20s using this thing called a laundromat.

Storing two weeks of extra food?

Storing 50 gallons of water?

It wasn’t happening.

On the plus side, we lived right next to a gas station, and I’m pretty sure it was open 24 hours. You could walk down there and get a big gulp anytime you wanted. That was our disaster survival plan, big gulps.

We felt ready for anything.

Back then, if someone had told me to start prepping for disasters, pandemics, and supply chain disruptions, I would’ve laughed in their face. I was a tenure-track professor specializing in adult literacy, ESL, and “remedial” education, fixing all the problems caused by underfunded schools. My students dealt with hunger (“food insecurity”) and homelessness (“housing insecurity”) all the time. I was usually giving them any spare cash I had for bus money or rent. Even my department chair gave them interest-free loans when their financial aid got tied up, and they collapsed into a chair in our own main office and sobbed.

That was the kind of collapse I was familiar with, the kind when an undergrad or grad student fell apart after their house burned down, their spouse threatened to kill them, they got sexually assaulted in an empty classroom, or they needed an emergency abortion. We were their disaster plan.

My campus saw events ranging from bomb threats to shootings at the Little Caesar’s across the street. We had a serial killer for a little while. One time, someone even found a body on campus. No big deal, just a corpse.

Oh, and women got raped in the bathrooms.

Only once or twice, though.

Between student loans and credit card debt, getting blown away in a storm was the least of my worries. I was 100 percent devoted to teaching. Hit me with swine flu. Hit me with tick-borne illnesses. If I could stand upright, you’d find me in the classroom. That was the attitude American capitalism instills in every good little teacher. We were following our passions. Eventually, someone would return the favor. Someone would take care of us when we needed it.

So I thought.

Almost all of my debt came from buying supplies for classroom projects. It came from paying for professional development workshops, conferences, airfare to those conferences, hotels, journal subscriptions, and books. There might’ve been an espresso or two in there, but they were worth it.

Instead of prepping, I invested everything into my community. Nights. Weekends. Extra cash. My “summers off.” You name it. Department chairs, deans, and vice chancellors made my job hell, but I was still trying. I still thought education could offer salvation to an ailing society.

Then the pandemic began.

What I’m trying to say:

Even though things look bad now, even though we’re staring at social and environmental collapse in the very near future, it’s always been kind of bad for a lot of people, and many of us only recently started giving any thought to anything like prepping or survival. It’s easy for suburban preppers and homesteaders to forget all that, because they haven’t been living in it. Some of us were already dealing with the reality that terrifies the prepping public.

So, what am I so scared of?