Today I ran across this Tweet:
The dog whistle target of this Tweet and the comments that follow should be clear enough to anyone who has witnessed our increasingly savage culture wars.
In case it wasn’t, one of the comments provided a helpful re-Tweet that translates this for the Bible thumpers among us:
After seeing this I ran immediately into this:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/asian-americans-terrified-of-coronavirus-backlash-stock-up-on-guns
I know, I know: this is silly on one level. Twitter is becoming the last refuge of folks from the Left and Right who express themselves with so little art and so much condescencion that they Tweet with all the time they saved by getting dis-invited from social events, family gatherings, etc.
But I think it establishes an important ground rule: don’t judge other people’s preps. You can offer advice, but in the end their circumstances are not yours and you cannot understand all of the elements of their decisionmaking. We are a nation of, what, 330 million people, with possibly as many individual sets of constraints, strengths and liabilities before them.
For instance, how do these two posters not know that some of these sales are in anticipation of the all too real possibility that emergency services are going to be overwhelmed by a surge of cases? How do they know they aren’t rural people, for whom protection by security services may have been a thin shield even before this current crisis happened?
I am guilty of breaking this rule. When this Covid-19 panic began I questioned, maybe even a little dismissively I am now embarassed to say, the folks who were stocking up on so much water. After all, municipal water supplies (the source of my own water) haven’t even been interrupted in Wuhan, China.
But now that I am sitting here shaking my head at these Tweets I wonder: were some of the people purchasing water on wells that might need service that might not be possible if we go into lockdown?
Tecumseh once said “trouble no one about their religion”. Well, I think an analogous mandate should apply in the prepping discussion.
And even if some preps are silly, they probably do provide psychological reassurance that steadies a person emotionally, allowing them to make better decisions in the face of crisis. And that can be as important as material preps.