SurvivalPreparing for the end of the world as we know it

In a growing trend, more and more Americans across the United States are preparing themselves for a catastrophic apocalypse.

For reasons ranging from terrorists to natural disasters or an economic meltdown, these individuals have begun stockpiling food, taking survival courses, or constructing safe rooms.

For instance Patty Tegeler, a resident of southwestern Virginia, has turned her rural home into a “survival center,” stocked with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food.

Tegler said in the event of a serious emergency, she could survive in her home indefinitely, and that the  emergency could be coming soon.

“I think this economy is about to fall apart,” she said.

This subculture, dubbed “preppers,” has found a rich community online with vendors hawking survival gear, guns, and water tanks as well as advice.

James Wesley Rawles, the author of Survival Blog, which is considered canonical among preppers, writes on his blog, “Unfortunately, given the increasing complexity and fragility of our modern technological society, the chances of a societal collapse are increasing year after year.”

Rawles is a former Army intelligence officer who has written several fiction and non-fiction worlds on apocalyptic events including “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It,” considered to be the preppers’ Bible.

“We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots,” Rawles said. “The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures.”

The preppers are not the first subculture to begin preparing for the end of the world. In the 1830s and 40s, Millerites, fervent followers of the charismatic preacher Joseph Miller, scared by the speed of technological developments during the Industrial Revolution, sold all of their possessions and awaited for the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1844.

More recently, hippies in the 1960s established communes in remote areas far from society, and in the 1990s, survivalists, who feared an oppressive government, sought safety beyond the reaches of civilization.

Cathy Gutierrez, a professor of religion at Sweet Briar College and an expert on end-times beliefs, explained that behind most of these movement is a sense of “suffering and being afraid” and in times of economic uncertainty, like now, these feelings are natural.

“With our current dependence on things from the electric grid to the Internet, things that people have absolutely no control over, there is a feeling that a collapse scenario can easily emerge, with a belief that the end is coming, and it is all out of the individual’s control,” Gutierrez said.

In contrast, Michael T. Snider, the author of the Economic Collapse blog, said, “Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days”

“You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends,” he said.

Snider’s main fear is an economic collapse in the United States. As evidence he points to the tens of millions living on food stamps and the many children living in poverty.

“Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that they understand what is happening,” Snider said. “A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it.”