That feeling of impending doom? Don’t ignore it. Doomsday could be right around the corner, via natural disaster or a block party featuring DJ Khaled, even if most of us don’t spend much time thinking about it. Our planet’s history is full of close calls — massive asteroids nearly colliding with Earth, supervolcanoes, plagues, the Cuban missile crisis. And these days we have Kim Jong Un, who acts like he might push the big, red button just to see what it does, and other real-life Bond villains (and wannabes) with buttons of their own. The near-end no longer seems that far-fetched.
So why aren’t fallout shelters more common? Nobody I know has one, and I know many people, some of whom are wealthy enough to live in million-dollar homes. If that sounds like you, consider this: What’s another 60 grand or so between friends? It’ll get you a nice 200-square-foot underground shelter, capable of withstanding a nuke. Too much? You can get a precast concrete bunker half the size for about $20,000.
If the world as we know it ends, you’ll have somewhere to go. If it doesn’t, you can use the space as a den or a playroom — useful in the event of a later cataclysm since repopulating the planet may be first on your new to-do list.
There is, however, an inconvenient problem. Prior planning of this nature can make you seem like a kook, especially if you won’t stop talking about it. That goes double if you have a dedicated YouTube channel. And a lot of people who have fallout shelters have made it their thing. That means when the dust settles, those who remain will mostly be doomsday preppers, aka crackpots. Unless we want them to inherit the Earth, we’ll need to dilute the gene pool with some well-adjusted, sensible folk — the kind who would never think of building a bunker.
Trying to talk normal people into bunker-building is ill-advised. If you’re going down that route, brace yourself for arguments against your position, chief of which have to do with necessity — or rather a lack thereof. “I don’t need one,” says the man with a Rolex wrapped around his wrist, a boat he never uses in his garage and a piano he doesn’t know how to play in his living room. Since when did not needing something get in the way of buying it? Prepare for the flood, lest you drown like Noah’s neighbors, I say. A false sense of security is dangerous in the best of times, let alone times like these.
Masters of the universe, with or without a nuclear button, don’t know how to divert a world-ending asteroid or electromagnetic solar flare. Nor can they stop a tsunami, earthquake or hurricane. These are massively complicated issues, requiring lots of money, effort and time to solve — which is boring. It’s cheaper, quicker and more fun to build bunkers for themselves and hope, for the sake of the rest of us, that the day never comes. If or when it does, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will crawl into their hidey-holes while the rest of us are left to burn.
So I’m building my own, stocked to the brim with Twinkies and potassium iodide pills. I urge you to do the same. Remember, you’re only a whack job if you go on and on about it (like I’m doing now.) But if you set it and forget it, no one’s the wiser.
If I close my eyes, I can see it: You’re in your bunker and I’m in mine, and I’m holding a CB radio and trying to find you in a post-apocalyptic world.
“This is Tamim Almousa, leader of the Build a Bunker movement. Is there anyone out there?”
“Yes, this is DJ Khaled, do you read me?”
Damn it.
Tamim Almousa is a copywriter and screenwriter.
