This isn't an insightful article. I would describe it as obfuscatory.

"Prepping" during the '50s and '60s was theoretically unified against a common problem: nuclear fallout. As the impacts of that fallout grew greater, so did the prepping until it became pointless. My grandparents' house has a 1600sqft fallout shelter instead of a basement, with mini gym and 18 months worth of self-canned food... and I played with kids who had legit concrete-lined fallout shelters with air raid sirens in their garages. It was a civil defense thing in the '60s that was seen as patriotic and as a reasonable response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Missiles would fly. The rich would survive. The Commies would lose, they'd just eliminate a season or two of crops and wipe out The Poors, no big deal really. That's something nobody wants to talk about: the entire civil defense footing of the Glory Days was racist AF. If you were a white homeowner with the resources to dig a pool or a fallout shelter, the patriotic ones dug a fallout shelter. If you were Black you didn't own a home and your neighborhood probably lacked civil defense shelters. There is one Black kid in that "duck and cover" video - they just move him around so he's always in frame whenever they show the kids. The post-apocalyptic world was gonna work out better for whitey, no doubt.

We forget this with our misty water-colored memories but every.single.TwilightZone.and.Outerlimits.episode about the end of the world is some form of "racists gonna race" and how the guy with the bomb shelter is gonna have to protect it from his neighbors who are friendly'n'all but he's the ant and they're the grasshopper and their name is probably Rodriguez. George Romero straight up put this as the theme of The Night of the Living Dead: there's a black guy who knows things, is better prepared to deal with "ghouls" and responds more honestly and decently than anybody else and when the "posse" shows up they shoot him by mistake. Disasters are where white privilege goes to flex.

That style of prepping went by the wayside when it became clear that any nuclear exchange would be world-ending. The minute the world wrapped its head around the idea of a "nuclear winter" it was done; the DoD put out a report saying that getting in a shallow ditch and covering yourself with a door and six inches of dirt would protect you from "most" forms of fallout and most people responded to the DoD by asking who exactly was going to pile dirt on the door? And what about those of us who actually have to deal with you know a nuclear explosion which by the way is like 95% of the population? Thus we went from hiding in our bunkers and being safe white people to roaming the wasteland with our whiteness dominating all. Road Warrior. Steel Dawn. Defcon Four. Damnation Alley. Ever wonder how a post-apocalyptic Australia is somehow utterly bereft of Aboriginals but chock to the gills with supercharged white bikers that seem to have their dad's gas card?

It all went pear-shaped when the Soviets lost, of course. Whose nukes are we gonna protect ourselves from now? That Atlas silo in the article? It was for sale for like eight years back in the '90s. Never once crossed $140k. Who wants to live in a goddamn missile silo in rural Kansas if you don't have to, especially since it isn't going to be particularly useful against anything but a nuclear attack? But it aaaalll started coming back in 2002 when suddenly it was okay to live in fear of minorities again. Sure, bin Laden likely wasn't to get more than one nuke but we gotta have that fear man, we gotta taste it so what, exactly are we prepping for?

WTSHTF - "when the shit hits the fan." "TEOTWAWKI" - "the end of the world as we know it." Basic, nondenominational fear of something that invariably requires you to stock up on shitloads of guns and ammo to defend your $250 Patriot Pantry Purchase against fuckin' Rodriguez again. Look - if you live in LA? And you have an emergency kit? You're not a fucking prepper you're a realist. Earthquakes happen. Brownouts happen. Forest fires happen. All the drinking water in LA has to get pumped uphill to make it to you and one bad powergrid failure and your life might be inconvenient for a few weeks.

But if you buy into a missile silo in Kansas because you want to "be prepared" you are a fucking choad.

I went down this rabbithole recently. I'm fucking around making jewelry. And men don't wear jewelry or buy jewelry-related items... unless you put the word "tactical" in front of it. "tactical" pen. "tactical" wallet. "Tactical" keyring. "Tactical" cufflinks. It's Rule 35 of the internet: "tactical" everything exists, and costs a shit-ton. It's part of the "EDC" fetish. You. Yes, you. The guy who knew immediately what "EDC" stands for. FUCK YOU. I'm talking to YOU. fuck off. Because I want you to fucking do a google image search on "EDC loadout" and notice that:

- it's a bunch of shit you will never use

- that's all black

- and exists solely to obfuscate the fact

- that you want to carry a fucking pistol around like a goddamn security blanket.

"Prepping" is the whitest fucking bullshit on the planet, while "EDC" is just straight racism. You know good and goddamn well that there isn't a black man alive who gets to walk around with a Glock so that he can feel better about his small penis - to quote Philando Castile's last words, "I wasn't reaching for it."

So yeah. "Prepping" is mainstream again. So are tiki-torch rallies, screaming "white power", paintballing and pepper-spraying the libs, and walking around in shirts suggesting that journalists should be hanged. It was always racist, it will always be racist, and acting like it's okay because Elon Musk has a private island is one of the many reasons black people are fucking sick of us.

There is no part of "prepping" that is not an elaborate Dance of the Seven Veils around the AR in your crotch. Stop fucking pretending otherwise.

Zrazhevskiy has been thinking about this for decades. He was born in Russia a few months after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. At the dinner table, his family often talked about the disaster and what went wrong. Then, after they relocated to New York, Zrazhevskiy stood on the waterfront outside his Brooklyn high school on September 11, 2001, and watched the World Trade Center towers collapse. Even then, he had a small go-bag prepared with disaster supplies.

THAT HE DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING NEED. Mutherfucker lived through Chernobyl and September 11 without needing so much as a tactical fucking can opener yet here he is with this on his homepage:

I dunno. I started this in a mildly annoyed mood and now I hate everyone. Fuckin' white postapocalyptic worry is the worst shit in the world.

The flip side of gun owning preppers are hippies preparing for the ecological disaster with self-reliant permaculture farms. It's like no matter what political side you're on, you feel that the world is doomed.