Don’t panic
The headline is what grabbed me: “Why you should own a gas mask.”
Admittedly this would be an awesome title for a book about raising teenaged boys and their seeming inability to clean a bathroom. Or, for that matter about sharing with my two brothers growing up. The article in question was about actual gas masks. We are talking about the scary, big-goggled, full head, World War I mustard gas attack type of devices.
The article actually starts with the idea that any face covering is better than none, especially in a nuclear fallout situation where an EMP device was used to disable the power grid and fry the failsafes that would shut down power plants before they overheated and all went Chernobyl. A common feature in these types of articles is setting up a strangely specific scenario and presenting it as if it could happen on any given Tuesday.
The article spent a lengthy amount of time about the value of always having a bandana handy. A large square of cotton cloth, according to the article, is good for everything from a mask to making a tourniquet. I couldn’t help but think of the advice to always carry a towel in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series by Douglas Adams I read in high school. The article also suggested just how fast I would have to shave off my beard in order not to suck in large radioactive particulates in the event that the mind-boggling complex series of disasters occurred where we would have a worldwide meltdown.
Through some poor choices made earlier in my life, the almighty algorithm that controls the flow of information we receive on the internet pegged me as someone with more than a casual interest in “prepper” topics. The article showed up as I was going down some internet rabbit hole while I was researching better off-grid ways of heating larger quantities of water while camping. This led to ways to dehydrate food, which led to learning about ways to create what are essentially papier maché logs out of old newsprint which burn cleaner and hotter than actually wood logs, which led to learning about making pemmican, which lead to the top 10 items to have in your “bug out bag” (BOB).
As we all know, a BOB, is a backpack or similar easy to carry bag that you have filled with your FAK (first aid kit) the essentials you would need when the SHTF (“stuff” hits the fan).
If you haven’t noticed, prepper writing is littered with these sorts of abbreviations.
To me the presence of obscure and largely unnecessary acronyms is the writing equivalent of using multiple colors of type face or all caps in an email. While in small quantities it may be effective, there is a definite tipping point where you imagine people with those big photo and yarn-covered evidence boards like you see in movies when the cops finally raid the crazy guy’s lair, which was cleverly hidden in his mother’s basement all this time.
The challenge of dealing with any of this is the fine line that exists between commonsense precautions in the likelihood of a natural disaster and going off the deep end into paranoid conspiracy theories about that green light coming out of your neighbor’s shed. There is a good chance that at some point in each of our lives, we may have to pick up and leave our homes at a moment’s notice whether it is because of fire, flood or in response to a family emergency. In many ways the BOB is nothing more than a grown up version of the diaper bag that every parent lugs around for the first two years of their child’s life, although without the purple elephants on it.
An article talking about the benefits of masks, respirators and gas masks that explains how and why they are used is useful. Even if the scenario is something more mundane than a global catastrophe or alien invasion, such as cleaning your teenager’s bathroom or opening the bag with their gym clothes that came home for the first time at the end of the semester.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
