someone at my work saw this article in the philadelphia weekly and decided to show it to me. it kinda made me chuckle a bit seeing some of the squirreliness in it...
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http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Survival-of-the-Fittest.html
Survivalism isn't just for white right-wingers anymore.
Fernando Salguero, his son and his dog.
Fernando Antonio Salguero grew up with his sister and mom in "a community of junkies and thieves" in a series of squats in Kensington. The worst year, he says, was 1985. Salguero is certain of this because it was the same year that Mayor Wilson Goode dropped a bomb on the West Philly building containing members of the radical group MOVE, killing six adults and five children. Salguero watched the bombing on a neighbor's TV.
Salguero was 11 years old. This was also the year he, his mom and his younger sister learned to survive on the five gallons of water a day that dripped from the faucet of the abandoned building where they squatted.
He says he's still haunted by the memories of going to school "not being able to shower properly, in clothes that weren't clean. The unbound contempt of other kids."
But those aren't his only childhood memories. Some of Salguero's youth was spent on various military bases with his dad, an Air Force chief master sergeant who helped "design the trigger and release mechanism devices for nuclear weapons."
There was probably no way Salguero was going to grow up to be boring. When he hit adulthood he studied Native American shamanism and became a survivalist. He got jobs working for environmental nonprofits, including as a door-to-door organizer for Ralph Nader's Clean Water Action Project.
These days the bespectacled, stocky guy rocks a black goatee and earns his living selling water and air purification and filtration systems. It's a subject Salguero is more than a little passionate about. But it's not the only topic that excites him.
Google his name and you'll find his footprints all over websites aimed at the dissatisfied and the suspicious, from moveon.org to the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Given his early contact with both Third World living conditions and some of the more mundane aspects of nuclear warfare, it's not surprising that Salguero isn't convinced that civilization in its current form is going to continue for much longer. He believes that a cataclysm will occur and that with the exception of himself, his loved ones and those he teaches, his species is horribly unprepared. When megamillion death comes a-courting it could be in one of any of a thousand guises, and Salguero is familiar with all the major suspects.
Years ago, the survivalist, or the man carrying the banner reading, "THE END IS NIGH," might have been dismissed as an eccentric. But what is surprising is the increasing number of Philadelphians who've come to share his fears. In December 2008 Salguero set up the survivalist meet-up group Survive and Thrive, which, as it proudly boasts on its website, is "open to all faiths, beliefs and lifestyles. BAR NONE."
Survive and Thrive, says Salguero, is for people who, like him, "don't fit the Confederate flag-hat-wearing, baccy-chewing, racism-spewing stereotype."
"This is not a stereotypical all-male, all-God-and-guns survivalist group. Atheist, Muslim, Jew, LGBT, women, immigrants-all are welcome."
By February 2009 the group had 44 members, many of them professionals, some of them liberal, "gay, straight, black, white," says Salguero. "No more than a handful are the white, male Christian Republicans you'd maybe expect."
But don't go mistaking Survive and Thrive for some sort of postapocalyptic bunny-hugging commune in the making. As the website emphasizes: "This is NOT a group that plans to work together in the event of a meltdown, but rather a group of individuals focused on SELF-PRESERVATION AND CARE OF OUR LOVED ONES." Today the group has 81 "prepared members."
In other words, no matter how nice and liberal Salguero might seem on first acquaintance-especially when compared to the (often blatantly racist) old-school survivalists-you do not want to be caught sniffing around his tomato vines after The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) unless you're looking for an ass full of buckshot.
Those turning up to Survive and Thrive looking for advice and information about practical cannibalism, ninja-stalking tactics or how to turn a semi- automatic weapon into a machine gun (all information that's out there on the survivalist Web) are likely to be disappointed. So far, Survive and Thrive meetings have been about post-disaster medicine, cooking, gardening and water purification. The next meeting, says Salguero, is likely to focus on health issues "like how to create a safe room and how to dispose of a corpse." The meeting after that- Survive and Thrive's eighth-may tackle guns and all that good stuff.
Salguero says we're dealing with a new breed of survivalist here. Educated, multicultural, often professional-far removed from the monocultural camo-clad gun nuts of the Cold War era.
He could be right. We live in interesting times. On the TV news we see right-wingers in tricorner hats waving teabags and speaking authoritatively about Obama's plans to "institute control of the civilian population through liberal front groups." On the Internet there's increased buzz about ex-police and military types organizing to keep their neighborhoods "safe."
Immediately after the election of the nation's first black president, millions of Americans panic-bought guns and ammunition. Last month, Michele Bachmann, a Republican member of Congress, stated her McCarthyite conviction that Obama is planning to build politically correct "reeducation camps for the young people." Alistair Howard, a politics professor at Temple University, reports being told by a student that the Serve America Act is yet another sure sign that we are on the road to military control of the civilian population.
And for $550 a New Jersey-based company called onPoint Tactical will arrange for you to be kidnapped in Philadelphia's Chinatown, as part of a course called Urban Escape and Evasion, which teaches "leading-edge skills to civilians who live and work in challenging urban environments or in urban centers that may destabilize during a crisis."
This all comes against the background rumble of hundreds of competing and complementary conspiracy theories, all given new life and an all but guaranteed audience by the Internet.
"When people stop believing in God," wrote the devout Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, "they don't believe in nothing-they believe in anything."
Switch out "God" for "the Soviet Union" in that sentence and you've got a pretty decent description of the confused post-Cold War survivalist zeitgeist.
Salguero thinks all religions contain "seeds of truth." And so, he says, do all conspiracy theories. When asked to list some of the reasons people have joined Survive and Thrive, Salguero starts with the Mayan calendar (which predicts major, possibly universe-ending change in 2012) and ends with the H1N1 virus.
In between he mentions the 9/11 Truthers, "martial law lite," something called Time Wave Zero, "war and rumors of war, economic distress, Posse Comitatus, solar flares and Hopi Indian predictions (they give us till 2040)."
Salguero argues that the neo-survivalists, whatever the reasoning behind them choosing to learn hardcore survival skills ("bee colony collapse or planetary disruptions or heavy metal contamination in the food supply"), are responding to "a visceral, gut instinct" that everything they know and rely upon could disappear at any moment.
In a photo on the Survive and Thrive site, Salguero is holding a German shepherd by a harness and wearing a T-shirt that manages to combine both death metal and Native American imagery. He also admits to owning a T-shirt that says "SURVIVOR OF THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE."
"It's a joke," he says.
Then there's 38-year-old lay preacher and rock singer Donald "Donno" Layton, whose dad is a "hardcore, old-school survivalist" who's "locked and loaded," should the apocalypse ever hit the Jersey 'burbs. Layton himself shares a West Philly house with his wife, his son Uzi, a Glock pistol, a Remington pump-action shotgun and an AK-47 assault rifle.
Layton chose the AK (the weapon of choice for terrorists everywhere) for its punk-rock shock value. But the Remington and the Glock, he says, were purely practical choices, both being popular enough with urban gun-owners that ammo and spares would be easily available, even after EOTWAA, (the End of the World Armageddon Apocalypse).
"I don't want the world to come to an end," says Layton, "but if there's zombies in the street or rioters or whatever, trying to get in here, they're going to have a hell of a time doing it." And then he laughs.
When I first meet 32-year-old AIDS activist Val Sowell, she's sitting on the sofa in a West Philly lefty-nerd commune, playing the zombie apocalypse game Fall Out on XBox. Sowell says she has a "go bag" packed, which is "part semiserious zombie survivalist and part me taking the advice of civic emergency planning people (and SEPTA ads)."
The coming apocalypse is a common topic of conversation in the commune. "I don't think we're unique in this at all, actually," says Sowell. "I mean, the apocalypse looms large in the public imagination; we admit the potential for multiple apocalypse scenarios. There's the obvious zombie apocalypse, but there's also potential for alien apocalypse, shadow-government-overthrowing-everything apocalypse, the 'Jesus comes back as a zombie and raises his army of zombies' apocalypse, peak oil/global-economic-instability apocalypse, the whole 2012 Mayan apocalypse … "
She goes on to catalog the nonstop, drip-drip-drip of the world-gone-to-hell/zombie movies, books, balls, crawls, comics and other apocalyptic paraphernalia, most with images of the fly-blown dispossessed munching vengefully and with righteousness on the bloated faces of the bourgeoisie.
A Pride and Prejudice zombie mashup stormed the bestseller list; Will Smith and his dog desperately sought the antidote to the to the super serum that cured cancer but turned everyone it touched into hyperventilating zombie vampires. They roamed a New York presumably already well-picked-over by the hyper-rabid face-munchers of the 28 Days Later franchise and then stomped into flaming rubble by the civilization-crushing clumsy teenager from outer-space code name: Cloverfield .
Every week the reality-based news media conjures up a hundred new ways that civilization as we know it might go splat. And every week thousands of filmmakers, novelists, comic writers and artists try to come up with a thousand more. It's almost as if Western culture-the freest, cutest, sexiest, cleanest, least intestinal parasitic worm-ridden and most affluent culture the world has ever seen-has a death wish.
Then, of course, there's the relatively recent example of an American city undergoing meltdown. The lessons of New Orleans during Katrina seem obvious. Despite all the fabricated, sensationalist and racist news reports about mass murders, rapes and beatings, when human beings find themselves in extremis-as happened at the Superdome-the strong looked after the weak and civilization of a sort was restored.
That's not how 39-year-old Jason Lawrence sees it. A Philly native, he's been organizing his Northwest Philly neighbors for the economic collapse he thinks is imminent. He thinks the big lesson of Katrina (and of the collapse of the Argentinean economy in 2001) is that when push comes to shove, well-armed neighborhoods will have to fight off mobs of looters.
"Traditionally, the stereotypical survivalist is the guy out in the woods," he says, "ready to bug out if society collapses. But my take on this is that we live in the city, in neighborhoods where lots of different people have different skills."
Harking back to the Great Depression, Lawrence says: "They were tougher people back then, we're a little more sissified. Maybe all the trouble we are going through now, we might learn some vital lessons such as self-sufficiency. Maybe we're getting fat and lazy and maybe we need to go on a diet."
Lawrence says he's been checking out which places, like his local baseball field, would make a good community garden. And he's talking to his neighbors about the coming collapse.
"I think individuals should be getting their gun-carrying permits. That may sound a little weird but I think people need to get familiar with weapons."
"You're going to need a shotgun and plenty of buckshot," he tells his neighbors. "You're not a trained soldier, you're not going to be fighting a long-range firefight with a guy in a flack jacket."
So after the world goes to hell, do we spend most of our time fighting or planting potatoes?
"I think that you'd spend most of your time gardening. I mean, soldiers spend a lot of time polishing their boots interrupted by short bursts of violence, so imagine there could be weeks of gardening and then maybe several hours of intense violence to repel looters. And then maybe several more weeks of gardening before a new bunch of intruders who haven't yet got the message also attack the neighborhood."
Thirty-three-year-old Mike Smith (not his real name) is, by his own admission, "a bit of a pretty boy." Smith, who stands 6 feet tall and weighs 170 pounds, says he's worried about the possums he thinks are eating all the eggplant in his Fishtown backyard and also about the end of the world.
"My father was in the military for 23 years. Him and some of his friends were real '80s Cold War survivalists. They had books with fallout patterns. Recently in the past six months or so, a bunch of my friends-the last people you'd think-are getting into the idea of survivalism."
When asked why, Smith speculates, "the Big Brother vibe, national ID cards, ID chips in people, the government bailing out companies, unemployment. One friend of mine is getting a gun because of the crime in his area of Philly." (Smith himself shot dead one of two armed robbers at his workplace.)
"I have slowly over time accumulated water, canned goods, freeze-dried food and knowledge, like how to use dry ice to preserve wheat. My girlfriend is into it. That's one of the things I love about her."
Forty-five-year-old David Williams (a former PW employee) runs the Germ Bookstore on Frankford Avenue-center of everything conspiratorial, fringe and survivalist in Philadelphia. "I think what we're seeing now," he says, "is a postpolitical survivalism. I mean I had a friend say to me recently, 'Weren't conspiracy theories more fun when they were right-wing?' There's been a definite peak of interest in survivalism. More people are attending events and fewer people look at the whole process as strange and ludicrous and ridiculous. There's a lot less eye-rolling. People are scared."
Williams has a Mossberg 410 at home. "I'm 45 and I'm not sure I'm ready for a new world. I'm not sure I'm ready to go down with the ship that's my house in Fishtown. But I have family in the Poconos."
