Are you Rapture Ready?

I’m a city mouse that wants to learn about the country. I grew up in Chicago and have specialized in comedy, computer skills and climate change. Since starting environmental policy graduate school, I realized how little relevance computers will have in the distopic Eaarth I believe is our future.

My sense of impending environmental and economic doom was compounded by the hipster zeitgeist that is low-impact farming and urban homesteading. Always one to follow the crowd, I too am enthralled by the idea, if not yet the actual execution of, canning vegetables and knitting hand-spun alpaca-wool fingerless gloves!

I believe the convergence of interest in community resilience and relocalization is more than a knee-jerk response to the era of globalization and corporate exceptionalism. We joke about Mayan predictions and solar pulses, but it seems even more likely that natural disasters and resulting ecosystem collapse will seriously impact our resource-extraction-based living standards. When that happens I want to be able to provide more for myself than we’ve been habituated to. As a post-college educated American I’m in the top 1% in terms of opportunities, and probably the bottom 1% in terms of actual applied survival skills. If there’s not a Wikipedia page about it that I can google on my smartphone, I probably won’t make it – that is, until after my awesome Survival Skillz Summer!

“Jessy,” you’re saying to yourself, “what makes you such an apocal-ist?” (*person who believes in an impending, non-Rapture based Apocalypse – patent pending) Not to be a killjoy, but our globalized economic system is constructed in a way that creates intense worldwide fragility. Farmers in developing countries can’t compete with our food subsidies, which drives them to city slums searching for work, and eventually on a northward migration.

Meanwhile, there’s only 3 days of food anywhere in America at any point in time. What if there was a major natural disaster – an earthquake, flood or tsunami? What would you do, where would you go? What is your emergency response plan? Because I don’t have one and that scares the shit out of me.

Growing up in the brief lull between the Cold War and the War on Terror imbued me with a naïve sense of institutional stability. But the world is in constant shift, and America is starting to look a lot like late-stage Rome (aka terminal), or 1933 Germany, depending on who you ask.

The military industrial complex is out of control, as we accrue multi-trillion dollar debt (these numbers don’t even mean anything anymore!) as we bomb brown babies and let the environment teeter on the edge of collapse. Apparently, the per capita debt in the US is $29,053.53 – a year’s salary?

And let’s not forget the National Defense Authorization Act, which strikes at the heart of that terrorist the Constitution. If I understand Colbert right, the military can now take anyone, anytime, anywhere for consorting with terrorists (buh-bye habeas corpus). But what does that mean in this surreally corrupt system, where our illustrious FBI seeks terrorists in such likely places as vegan potlucks?

The corporate kleptocracy is visible everywhere – especially in agribusiness, where multinational monopolies criminally patent Life, while simultaneously refusing to label these Frankenstein laboratory ‘foods’, depriving American consumers of the right to know what they’re eating.

Railing against Monsanto feels dangerously close to challenging America’s core principles, considering how many people are drawing dual salaries from biotech companies and the US government.

I want you!

So here I am, trying to get Rapture Ready. For getting Left Behind, that is! All I want is to make cobb houses and keep chickens and stay out of the way when whatever comes down the pipe finally shows up! So I’m hitting the road this summer to get Rapture Ready. I’m also starting an Apoca-pod for concerned citizens who want to be prepared for disasters, but not kick it with the Michigan militia. Maybe we could be the Apocal-ists? Apo-scialsits? A work in progress… Send me your ideas!

8 thoughts on “Are you Rapture Ready?

  1. OMG Jessy, I love this!!! I wish I could go with you. In the meantime, I am slowly getting my little garden ready. A water supply container comes next. I want to be an apocalist cause everyone else is gonna be hurtin!

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