Survival magazines are periodicals intended for people who are dedicated to stayin’ alive, not the 1977 Bee Gees hit, but those committed to surviving an inevitable catastrophic event. What will it be? An earthquake? A volcano? A tsunami? The next election?
These people are sure that in the near future, they are going to have to hunker down with their immediate family, probably underground. So, for somewhere between five days and 25 years, they hope to avoid just about everything that can happen in a Tom Cruise movie.
The magazines are full of cheery articles, as evidenced by cover headlines like Surviving the World’s Worst Typhoon; How to Choose a Survival Firearm; Arrange Back-up Ammunition; Post-Disaster Tools; and my favorite, The Day the Cell Phones Died, which for me was yesterday.
My favorite feature is titled: Don’t buy survival food … until you read this. Nuts. I had already done my apocalypse shopping and now I was stuck with 147 fruit cakes.
One writer advocates a brand of survival food going so far as to say that it is “better than any survival food I’ve eaten.” This is the kind of testimony that is hard to discount, not unlike the words of Charles Manson, who once observed that San Quentin had the best Salisbury steak of any prison he’d ever been to. You can’t buy PR like that. “The product literally flies off the shelves,” the unidentified author writes. You can expect that line to show up on a lot of English teachers’ lesson plans on exactly how not to use the word “literally.”
In one paragraph, the author notes that “many people with good intentions are making critical food mistakes when stockpiling food.” I see this a lot when I am at Golden Corral for dinner. Do people ever learn?
The writer’s biggest concern appears to be that some of the MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat) available in stores may only have a shelf life of five years, which is less than the lifespan of a jar of honey, but about four years, 11 months, three weeks, six days and 22 hours longer than a tub of potato salad at a picnic.
If you order a survival kit, which includes these meals, you get 5,550 heirloom survival seeds. Who counted these out? Whoever it was is not going to have any problem occupying himself underground for two decades.
Also thrown in with the deal are four hardcover books. They don’t tell you what the books are about, but with so much time to kill, I’m not sure anyone will care — as long as they are not library books. Oh, by the way, you also get a really cool 11-in-1 survival knife. After all, when you are about to go underground for the rest of your life, you deserve a lovely parting gift.
