Welcome to the Club

I remember being astonished when I was a kid to realize that we were living on a billiard ball rolling around in space. I remember being amazed that stuff didn’t crash into us. (Turns out it does.)

We are vulnerable here on earth. Even if people weren’t messing up the planet and the vibes, it’s just a wild old universe and always has been. The writings of ancient cultures show that we here on Earth have been obliterated and started over, certainly more times than we can count on one hand.

Humankind has had the fortune these last centuries to be living in a tiny, tiny slice of time when the Earth was pretty calm, the weather fairly friendly — until just recently. Wake up! This ain’t no theme park. It comes with supervolcanoes and viruses.

In ways the mainstream can no longer ignore, the world is starting to experience effects of what the forward-thinkers have been pointing out for a couple of decades now: We have gone too far. Too much is too wrong. Too many critical systems are in crisis. What a mess. The future is here.

Coming to terms with the way things are is a lot like coming to terms with dying. You do get angry, you do grieve. It’s okay. I went through a period when I cried in public over the littlest nothing. I was just an open, grieving heart, beyond the personal. And I see other people crying, too. There are a lot of us.

But after the roil of grieving, comes the calm of acceptance. And it’s true — the truth will set you free. “In dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change or accident.” So says Henry David Thoreau. Meanwhile, David Byrne reminds us, “We’re going boom boom boom, and that’s the way we live.”

That’s why I made these quizzes. To get real. The questions we have to ask ourselves these days, to survive, are the wake-up call.

I did my best to make these quizzes serve not only as a way to assess your survival readiness, but also as a survival manual — to ask useful questions and give useful answers. If the nukes are flying, and these quizzes are all you have, I don’t want you to go out frustrated and cursing the quizzes and author. If it’s 10 degrees outside, with a foot of snow, and your electricity’s been out for 48 hours, I would like you to find a little cozy comfort in these quizzes, even if it involves wrapping yourself in newspaper and garbage bags.

In researching these quizzes, I tried to find info from experts who seemed to know what they were talking about, as opposed to the other kind. And I aimed to get multiple confirmations of the facts I’ve included. Sources I used included Cresson Kearny’s Nuclear Survival Skills, The U.S. Army Survival Manual, The Red Cross, many guides to biological, chemical, natural, and nuclear disasters, many survival and first aid guidebooks, and interviews with experts.

Now could be a good time for all of us to do the work of processing the dying of our illusions, our unconsciousness, our sleep, our world as we knew it.

As Stephen Gaskin writes in his book This Season’s People, “We are all really one thing, and we’re all in this together, and no matter how we make it look, we are really and truly going to share fortunes.”

Welcome to the club.