I was listening to a lefty political radio show when an ad came on for My Patriot Supply, a company that lives by the motto, “It’s not just food. It’s freedom.” Its website says, “We believe it’s every person’s patriotic duty to achieve TRUE FREEDOM from our world’s increasingly unstable and fragile systems. The best way to do this is to rely on yourself—not governments or neighbors—for the basics of life . . . . Our food, water, and supplies keep you secure, self-reliant, and able to face any challenge on your own terms.”
Living with a disability for more than sixty years has taught me a lot about interdependency.
My Patriot Supply sells survival items like a candle that burns for 100 hours and batches of non-perishable entrées such as “Creamy Chicken Flavored Rice.” (Just add water, apparently.)
I’m sure there are people on both the right and left who believe that those on the other side are gaining momentum to go on a rampage, leaving the rest of us to hunker down to survive. My friend Brian, who is about as progressive as they come, is convinced that something akin to a race war will be upon us within a few years.
But I don’t share his sense of inevitability. Maybe it’s because I’m about twenty-five years older than he is, and I’ve been hearing white supremacist idiots spewing about the coming race war since I was a kid. The problem is, you can’t really start a war unless you can get a lot of others to join in with you, and nobody on any side is ready to drop everything and take up arms—except their few-and-far-between idiot followers.
Brian says he hopes I’m right. Still, he feels that since the Trump years the forces of racism, fascism, and general rightwing extemism have become stronger than ever. And he thinks it’ll get to the point where people like him and me will have no choice but to get dragged into their civil war, even if only for self defense.
I just tell myself I’m not going to worry about it, just like when I heard the survivalist radio commercial. I don’t think it’s because I’m naive enough to believe that a total, prolonged collapse of human support systems could never happen in the United States. I don’t think it will but I suppose it could. But if things get that bad, even a candle that burns for a million hours or a bottomless bowl of Creamy Chicken Flavored Rice won’t save me.
Living with a disability for more than sixty years has taught me a lot about interdependency. I use a motorized wheelchair, and I need help every day doing the things everybody does every day, like getting out of bed, getting dressed, and making breakfast. I’ve hired a crew of people to come to my home and assist me; their wages are paid by a state program funded mostly by Medicaid. So I rely on them to keep me moving through life and they rely on me for money. It’s a win-win.
If we all have to retreat to our respective bunkers, who’s going to leave their bunker every day to come get me out of bed in mine? I can’t go very long without relying on other humans.
And I’m grateful for that reality: I think it‘s helped me outgrow the self-sufficiency phase of arrested development faster than I would have. I won’t bother building a bunker because if things deteriorate that much, I’m screwed. So I’m better off spending my time and energy fighting for systems that emphasize cooperation, like the one that gets me through each day.
I don’t think the most ardent survivalists would last long in the bunker either. We all had a taste of that lifestyle early in the pandemic, when almost everything shut down. The far-right types have been the main ones complaining early and often about how everything needs to open back up. They couldn’t take it.
The sooner we stop pretending we don’t need each other, the better.