Milk and Honey (Part Three)

Southern Californians are primed for apocalypse. It lives and breathes within us. We’re certainly not prepared for it. We haven’t retrofitted nearly enough buildings to withstand major earthquakes, we haven’t found proper alternatives for protecting and augmenting our water supplies, we’re still pursuing energy industries that are destructive to our environments, we’re overpopulating, and we continue to disregard the multitudes of people already experiencing apocalypse on individual levels.

Sometimes it feels like the masses are waiting for a big event coming down the pipe, like it’s inevitable, and hope has already deserted us and we’re just going through the motions of schooling our kids and working our jobs and tending our friends and families.

Or perhaps we’re thinking the powers that be, government or official agencies or the gods themselves, will take care of the big picture and we’re trusting to fate.

Fate is a fickle bitch.

Sometimes it works out for a lucky few, but most who leave their circumstances to chance, the ones that say whatever happens, happens, or what is meant to be, is meant to be, don’t end up in a good way. I’m not someone who believes in predetermined states or ends.

I don’t think for a second everything turns out ‘the way it’s supposed to,’ there’s no such thing as mapped out, scheduled lives that are hardwired in advance to play out the way they do.

You’d never be able to convince me those kids with cancer in UCLA’s pediatric oncology wards were ‘destined’ to die, they were never meant to grow older, their plan was never going to include falling in love or to have families or to become anything more than a sick child allotted a mere seven years on earth and no more.

You’d have zero chance persuading me those humans born with severe brain damage, where they’ll spend their entire lifetimes in a wheelchair fed through g-tubes and unable to meaningfully interact with others, they were meant to live those lifetimes via some master plan.

There is no master plan.

I’m versed in most of the religious justifications about suffering in the world.

I know why people turn to gods to make sense of awful things like poverty and wars and sickness, and children dying. But belief in a divinely inspired scheme that calls people home at arbitrary times, no, that isn’t reality.

Reality is, California lies on the western edge of the North American continent, whose bedrock foundations have cracks and faults in it, and tectonic shifts are eventually going to move that geology. Reality is, the southwestern portion of the United States is one big desert, its climate and limited natural resources reflect that, and if we humans elect to build portions of our civilization here, we’ll have to deal with the dangers thereof and that’s why SoCal is subject to so much apocalyptic bent and that’s why some of our children die in fires, floods, and earthquakes. That’s reality.

For some years now I’ve had a moderate preparation established for moderate sorts of apocalypse. I’m not so ardent in my doom and gloom I’ve moved to a bunker or a fortified cabin in the remote wilderness, as some have done. I still dig concerts and greasy spoon diner food too much to give up modern life amenities entirely.

I’ve accepted the fact that because I continue to prefer living among humans, I may pay a mortal price for that eventually, and that’s fine. I’m old enough where I’ve lived a fortunate life of (white) privilege and have nothing to complain about, upon the moment of my passing.

But in the interim, I’ve exercised my middling version of Boy Scout preparedness, less than some, more than others, and if you’re Californian I’d heartily recommend doing at least some of the same, because it’s absolutely inevitable that eventually we will suffer a widespread semi-apocalypse, and there’s a chance you might survive it with minimal advance planning.

I’ve stored a stash of fuel and three months’ worth of MRE’s and non-perishable canned goods, bottled water, and a few cords of firewood.

I placed emergency backpacks in each of our family vehicles that hold, more or less, the following items: 2 liters of water, 20 protein bars, 2 emergency blankets, 1 emergency radio with batteries and a small solar panel and a hand crank, 1 first aid kit, 2 rolls of toilet paper, 1 camp knife, 1 multi-tool, 1 pair of binoculars, spare batteries, two books of waterproof matches, 1 tube of pepper spray, pen and paper, spare eyeglasses (Rx), spare medications, spare painkillers, 1 travel toothbrush/toothpaste/ bar of soap, 1 spare battery charge pod for cell phone, cash, and 10 tablets of potassium iodide.

That last thing? Olympic teams, the Secret Service, and law enforcement networks have it on hand at all times. It basically protects your thyroid gland from absorbing radiation, presuming you survive the nuclear incident which precipitated those pills’ necessity. My boys tease me about the idea of having ‘nuke’ pills at the ready, as if they’d be a saving grace in such a situation, and logic dictates they’re right in scoffing at the viability of that measure. It’s just more Boy Scout peace of mind.

Sometimes I think being prepped might be more important than actual survival. I think of those citizens rioting in Louisiana and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the news footage of the lawlessness, the clear need for better preparation on everyone’s part, most of all FEMA and the utter failure of that agency under Dubya’s reign, but also at the individual levels. For myself, I have to know I at least tried to survive the offending event and that I attempted to avert pending doom.

I don’t wanna be that guy, the guy that bent over and said fuck it, I’m gonna die come what may. I have to know I tried. Better to die trying than to doing jack shit, which was, to wit, a main thread of the American tapestry in the messed up year that was 2020, as too many people continued to embrace a stagnated status quo to avoid the pressing need for change, whether it was Covid-19 quarantine protocols or a mass shift in addressing systemic racism.

That’s why the Black Lives Matter protestors risked their lives during a global pandemic. Surviving isn’t enough. Existing with honor and dignity and equity and rights for all peoples, properly allocating resources, addressing imminent threats of climate change by halting continued expansion of militaristic and corporate industry, shifting to an ecologically sustainable society…that is the true winning end game.

Our children deserve better than apocalypse.

It’s not too late to avert it.

But it’s almost too late.

Apocalypse paints a far rosier picture in literature, television, and movies, with plucky ragtag survivors, regrouping and rebuilding after defeating long, death-defying odds. That’s artistic license. In real life it will be a grisly, ugly affair, not rendered in glorious widescreen epic proportions, it would cut to the quick. Brutal. Final. Painful.

Unite as one people.

Invest in assuming proper stewardship of our home.

Or let it all burn.

*Compiled from August 7th, 2020