The crisis has also highlighted how woefully inadequate many of our living arrangements are for social distancing. These spectacles of desperation are both a censure of our society and a revelation about our collective lack of personal preparedness. With about 15 percent of the population now unemployed, Americans are looking for assistance from food banks, in lines stretching for miles in some places. President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to prevent meat shortages.
Six weeks after the initial pandemic hoarding spree, many key commodities are still in short supply. The rarer something is, the more people seek it. Scooping up scarce necessities gives people a sense of control during times of uncertainty, so the great toilet-paper dash-and-grab of 2020 was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although preppers have long been the subject of ridicule, I imagine many of us will take on some of their habits, or at the very least make space in our closets and garages for nonperishables. I know I did, even as I traveled the world writing a book about them. And if you knew they were stockpiling before the disaster, you likely thought they were weirdos. One wrote me, “These people are fixing a leaky roof in a rainstorm.”Ĭhances are you have a neighbor who was ready for this pandemic. I’ve spent the past three years interviewing people preparing for an ambiguous future disaster, and some of them emailed me in the early days of the pandemic from their redoubts, expressing wry frustration as they watched shoppers on TV frantically stacking supplies-hand sanitizer, bottled water, and, yes, toilet paper-in their shopping carts. For them, long-term food storage is a baseline, so making it through a season or two without venturing out is primarily a psychological challenge. Preppers all over the world have been hunkered down safely at home or in their bunkers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
About the author: Bradley Garrett is the author of the forthcoming book Bunker: Building for the End Times.
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