Friends,
What is it about fear that makes people go to such great(and seemingly futile) lengths (and cost) to feel safe??? A story as old as (recorded) time, fear has allowed people to profit from the fears of others over countless centuries. It’s what Naomi Klein calls
Disaster Capitalism, and today the disaster capitalists are doing quite well thanks to the mass fear mongering that has reached epic proportions as the Global War on Terror has continued to escalate.
Many of you remember the good old bomb shelter days of the bad old Cold War. Back in the 1950s many folks decided that “duck and cover” just didn’t cut it for their families. Keeping up with the Joneses in the 50s often meant building a bomb shelter in one’s back yard (or basement). People buried these huge steel drums outfitted with at least a few of the comforts of home – beds, lanterns, canned food and water – and waited for the sirens.
Many also had a radiation detector, a nifty device with which they could determine when it was safe to go outside and try to rebuild their lives in what would have been a vast, radioactive wasteland had the Superpowers unleashed even a portion of their massive nuclear arsenals (roughly 65,000 warheads at the peak of the Cold War).
Well folks, if you are waxing nostalgic right about now for the old days, look no further. USA Today just reported that
“Doomsday Shelters” are making a comeback. This is Disaster Capitalism at its best (or should I say worst). At least a couple of companies are making some pretty good money capitalizing on people’s worst fears and digging some pretty big holes in the ground and calling them “Catastrophe Shelters.”
Think of it as the ultimate pre-catastrophe timeshare. You buy a share for $50,000 per adult, and only half that for kids. When something really nasty is about to go down, you just head down to your designated shelter and, assuming there isn’t an angry mob also trying to get in, pop inside and wait out the worst (and wait, and wait, and wait…). Is that a great deal or what??? Of course, I don’t even want to start asking how they are going to guarantee up to “five years with food, power, water and filtered air”, not to mention how they will keep out the masses of zombies.
All kidding aside, the people behind this trend deny that they are profiting from people’s fears. As Robert Vicino, a disaster denizen and founder of the Vivos underground shelter network, says:
You don’t think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear,” he says. The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn’t make it a waste or bad… We’re not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We’re creating a solution.
Countdown to Zero is opening this weekend in California and across the country. Recognizing the threat to humanity that nuclear weapons pose, Lawrence Bender, the producer of An Inconvenient Truth, worked with director Lucy Walker on a new film to make the case for nuclear disarmament and inspire people to join the worldwide movement to make zero nuclear weapons a reality. At a time when big changes on nuclear disarmament are in motion, this documentary is a critical tool to reach the generations of people in the US who never had to do duck and cover drills.