Do you know what it's like to believe you know the date of the world's demise?
You all ridicule the y2k survivalists now, you laugh, you say we were alarmist and, on the whole, rather stupid. But do you know us? do you know who were are, and who we were? We are your neighbors, we are ordinary people. And we were afraid.
Complete socio-economic collapse, they said, and we believed. No power, no food. For weeks, months, years, who knew how long. We knew everything the media wasn't telling us, that there were problems, and no one knew what was going to happen. We thought that, even if nothing happened, it was better to be prepared.
Be Prepared. We weren't Boy Scouts, we were survivalists. We wanted to survive.
We bought canned food, dehydrated food, wheat grain and a grinder, a solar cooker, a rototiller, a hand-pushed lawnmower, a hand-crank clothes washer, a two-man handsaw, two water filters, many cords of wood, two woodstoves, a generator, a truck, a house, a real handpump with a well.
We only did what we had to.
I'd read too many books, and I thought it would be kind of cool to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland caused not by nuclear war, but by the demise of all computers due to a date bug. My parents were the ones who filled us with fear -- they told their relatives and a few of their friends, but otherwise kept it a closely guarded secret -- otherwise everyone would know where the food is.
We were like religious fanatics, and suddenly everyone was judges on whether or not they were "preparing." People were afraid of us.We drove out to our house a week before the "rollover", a week before "TEOTWAWKI", The End Of The World As We Know It, and had little contact with the outside world.
When it ended, we woke up the next morning, and everything was beautiful. We left our doomsday farm and went home, and pretended it never happened. We know now that it is endlessly better to be happy than to be prepared.
I know that some people live a survivalist lifestyle, and that for them, the fear and agony of the world's death never truly ends. For you, survivalists, I must say I am truly sorry.