Posted on 05/27/2009 11:20:29 AM PDT by new cruelty
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 neighbors 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 hes still haunted by the memories of going to school not being able to shower properly, in clothes that werent clean. The unbound contempt of other kids.
But those arent his only childhood memories. Some of Salgueros 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 Naders 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. Its a subject Salguero is more than a little passionate about. But its not the only topic that excites him.
Google his name and youll 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, its not surprising that Salguero isnt 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 whove 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, dont 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, immigrantsall 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 youd maybe expect.
But dont 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 acquaintanceespecially when compared to the (often blatantly racist) old-school survivalistsyou do not want to be caught sniffing around his tomato vines after The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) unless youre 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 thats 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 Thrives eighthmay tackle guns and all that good stuff.
Salguero says were dealing with a new breed of survivalist here. Educated, multicultural, often professionalfar 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 Obamas plans to institute control of the civilian population through liberal front groups. On the Internet theres increased buzz about ex-police and military types organizing to keep their neighborhoods safe.
Immediately after the election of the nations 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 Philadelphias 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 dont believe in nothingthey believe in anything.
Switch out God for the Soviet Union in that sentence and youve 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.
Its a joke, he says.
Then theres 38-year-old lay preacher and rock singer Donald Donno Layton, whose dad is a hardcore, old-school survivalist whos 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 dont want the world to come to an end, says Layton, but if theres zombies in the street or rioters or whatever, trying to get in here, theyre 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, shes 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 dont think were 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. Theres the obvious zombie apocalypse, but theres 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. Its almost as if Western culturethe freest, cutest, sexiest, cleanest, least intestinal parasitic worm-ridden and most affluent culture the world has ever seenhas a death wish.
Then, of course, theres 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 extremisas happened at the Superdomethe strong looked after the weak and civilization of a sort was restored.
Thats not how 39-year-old Jason Lawrence sees it. A Philly native, hes 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, were a little more sissified. Maybe all the trouble we are going through now, we might learn some vital lessons such as self-sufficiency. Maybe were getting fat and lazy and maybe we need to go on a diet.
Lawrence says hes been checking out which places, like his local baseball field, would make a good community garden. And hes 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.
Youre going to need a shotgun and plenty of buckshot, he tells his neighbors. Youre not a trained soldier, youre 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 youd 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 havent 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 hes 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 friendsthe last people youd thinkare 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. Thats one of the things I love about her.
Forty-five-year-old David Williams (a former PW employee) runs the Germ Bookstore on Frankford Avenuecenter of everything conspiratorial, fringe and survivalist in Philadelphia. I think what were seeing now, he says, is a postpolitical survivalism. I mean I had a friend say to me recently, Werent conspiracy theories more fun when they were right-wing? Theres 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. Theres a lot less eye-rolling. People are scared.
Williams has a Mossberg 410 at home. Im 45 and Im not sure Im ready for a new world. Im not sure Im ready to go down with the ship thats my house in Fishtown. But I have family in the Poconos.
Thank Goodness for that. Those Cons really stink up a co-op after a few days.
Really, though. The agenda of this article disturbs me: "We are an all inclusive survivalist group, unlike those Republicans, who want to kill the gays and brown-skinned folk".
Still, I liked this quote-
Harking back to the Great Depression, Lawrence says: They were tougher people back then, were a little more sissified. Maybe all the trouble we are going through now, we might learn some vital lessons such as self-sufficiency. Maybe were getting fat and lazy and maybe we need to go on a diet.
Smart move, hippy.
Not.
Of course, after the fall of civilization, who is to say that the chances of survival are not increased by "punk-rock shock value"?
After the fall, if you see a green-mohawked man helping a little old lady cross the street in Houston, that would be me: Still a nice, helpful person, but chock full o' punk rock shock value.
>After the fall, if you see a green-mohawked man helping a little old lady cross the street in Houston, that would be me: Still a nice, helpful person, but chock full o’ punk rock shock value.
LOL - Awesome response.
Great. Now the post-TEOTWAKI lines begin to be formally drawn...
LOL
Last I looked Philly was just about at THOTWAWKIT.
You wanna survive, get out of the City. Any City.
I thought the 9-11 truther movement was FOR racism spewing dilettantes.
It isn't just white people buying guns. The author is perpetrating racist stereotypes. There are ads on black audience radio stations about getting concealed carry licenses to protect your home from thieves and invaders.
When people stop believing in God, wrote the devout Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, they dont believe in nothingthey believe in anything.Switch out God for the Soviet Union in that sentence and youve got a pretty decent description of the confused post-Cold War survivalist zeitgeist.
When people stop believing in the Soviet Union, they dont believe in nothingthey believe in anything.
That doesn't make any sense.
Including crooked cops who abdicate the responsibilities of their job to flee town or loot Wal-Mart with the commoners.
This guy reminds me of the Burt Reynolds character in the movie DELIVERANCE. Ready for anything till he breaks his leg. then he is helpless and must rely on less prepared people.
Now wait, I watched Fist Of The Northstar and those guys are the ones mowing down old ladies with motorcycles.
Until Kenshiro punches them and their head explodes.
"...Some of Salgueros 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...."Such a drama queen, and such a liar. There could not possibly be truth to this statement.
As an aside, but in a related vein: I bought my first house recently. It is old. The previous owner was an odd one. The more I poke around, the more odd I consider him. He is now a 9.5 out of 10 in my mind due to recent developments: There was supposedly an old, defunct "cistern" in the back yard, according to the realtor. I lifted the cover and it did not look like any cistern I ever read about, so my interest was piqued. I finally got around to pumping it out last weekend, and forced myself to go down into the hole and investigate.
It is NOT a cistern, but an underground shelter circa the 1950s. It has/had electricity. It also has crawdads. I do not know if it was meant for tornadoes ratrher than nukes, but I will find out when I can spend more than 15 seconds down there. It is stinky, hot, and oppresive.
I could go on about it (I am so d@mned excited about it, I feel like I'm 12 again!) but I won't. I may start a thread when/if I get photos of it.
Would the acronym for that be CWAP?
Ralph Nader’s CWAP, no less.
And the hollywood celebs armed with dixie cups to help scoop up the rising flood waters.
Exactly what I was thinking.
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