Always three
days late and a four-dollar bill short, I’m just getting to Kevin Sullivan’s insightful
but mistitled “A fortress against fear” from the August 27 Washington Post (online here). And I wouldn’t have
gotten to it at all, if one of my coffee buddies hadn’t recommended it.
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| Prepped |
Except they don’t live there; they survive. That’s one of the two fundamental
mistakes preppers make. They confuse living
and surviving. The other: they
also equate security with a well-supplied fortress that may be
fire and shit-storm proof but doesn’t keep out fear.
When I walk
down to the corner for coffee – as I will later this morning – and meet with
whoever happens to be there and when we talk about the weather first, then
about whatever is on our fraying minds, in our decaying hearts, or gnawing at
our bowels, I am living – we are.
When I drive my 4x4 back home and carefully
lock, deadbolt, and chain the door behind me, then go down to my bomb shelter
to check the freezer and oil and reload my guns, I am not. I may be surviving, but I am not living. It is
the difference between sex with another person when you don’t care who hears and
sex with a magazine when your mother might come through the door at any minute.
But, let’s
say, down in my basement shelter, oiling my guns, I slide into my crank-radio a
CD of Christian music and, unaccountably! among the slick, sick songs of
praise, there is a poorly recorded, home-made track of a half-empty church
singing, “A Mighty Fortress.”
For
still our ancient foe
Doth
seek to work us woe;
His
craft and power are great,
And
armed with cru-él hate;
On
earth is not his equal.
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| Rita Hayworth in a strapless gown |
Then I have
to realize, don’t I, that the gun I am dressing can not kill what really ails me
any more than reinforced concrete walls sunk deep under a back woods of the
Idaho panhandle will keep him/her/it out. (Not that I actually live in Idaho.)
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Even if secure meant only safe from
harm, I am not secure even there. But secure
means more than safe. Safe is to
secure as wearing body armor to a riot is to wearing a ball gown to . . . well, a
ball.
To sum up:
-
It
is better to drink coffee with friends than to oil one’s gun alone.
-
Martin
Luther wrote better hymns than Chris Tomlin does.
- It is better
to be secure in a strapless gown than safe behind the freezer, even if it
contains a two-year supply of bottled water and venison jerky.
