So a couple of weekend ago, my friend Tara (who had been one of my mission companions) asked me if I was interested in "Preparedness". I said it depended, which is true, because I'm all for learning first aid, and food storage lectures can be fun if they include free samples and recipes, but I don't have much attention span for water purification, and really it all depends on how entertaining the presenter is.
Tara clarified that she was inviting me to a "preparedness expo" that she and her sister were going to, and sent me a link to the event Web page. Looking it over, what most caught my attention was the variety of topics-home defense, essential oils (one of these times I will have to tell you about essential oils), first aid, government conspiracies, the "fountain of youth", and the Book of Revelations. It looked like about the kookiest event I'd heard of this year.
So of course I had to go.
Getting there was a but of an adventure itself; my phone seems to really struggle with figuring out where addresses are in Cache Valley and had led me wrong a few times, and weird side effect of using a car on my mission is that when you are used to having a 650 mile restriction per month you feel guilty for wasting miles on wrong turns. But I finally arrived. My friend was already in a class when I showed up at the little expo center, so I wandered around a bit and was very aggressively advertised to by a guy selling animated Bible videos-but I managed to walk away without signing up to pay $30 a month for a stack of movies for my not-yet-existant-children so I guess it was a victorious encounter. (Maybe that's why people are so reluctant to talk to missionaries, they probably expect us to talk like that...)
But, anyway, I meet up with Tara and her sister, and we meet her sister's friend that was saving us seats for the big star lecture of the afternoon-a promising one, all about what is going to happen to the U.S. during the apocalypse. Tara's sister's friend, whom I ended up sitting next to, was a cheerful grey-haired woman who told me she was so delighted I was there.
"What do you notice about the age of most of the people here?" she asked me. I looked around at the room, which was mostly filled with senior citizens.
“A little bit older than me." I conceded.
"More like a lot bit older than you." She corrected me. "Why isn't more of your generation awake? We're all half dead so we aren't that awake ourselves." Then she gave me some chewable vitamin C supplements.
On my other side, Tara and her sister insisted that I try some fancy hot chocolate that they had bought during the expo the night before. Apparently they toast and crush the actual cocoa beans, "like coffee. But it's not coffee." At their insistence, I tried a sip of the substance in the thermos they produced, and find my mouth full of a bitter, gritty, grainy substance. "Sorry about that," the sister said when she saw my face, "you're supposed to filter out the grounds, but I was in a hurry this morning."
But, anyway, I meet up with Tara and her sister, and we meet her sister's friend that was saving us seats for the big star lecture of the afternoon-a promising one, all about what is going to happen to the U.S. during the apocalypse. Tara's sister's friend, whom I ended up sitting next to, was a cheerful grey-haired woman who told me she was so delighted I was there.
"What do you notice about the age of most of the people here?" she asked me. I looked around at the room, which was mostly filled with senior citizens.
“A little bit older than me." I conceded.
"More like a lot bit older than you." She corrected me. "Why isn't more of your generation awake? We're all half dead so we aren't that awake ourselves." Then she gave me some chewable vitamin C supplements.
On my other side, Tara and her sister insisted that I try some fancy hot chocolate that they had bought during the expo the night before. Apparently they toast and crush the actual cocoa beans, "like coffee. But it's not coffee." At their insistence, I tried a sip of the substance in the thermos they produced, and find my mouth full of a bitter, gritty, grainy substance. "Sorry about that," the sister said when she saw my face, "you're supposed to filter out the grounds, but I was in a hurry this morning."
Well, in terms of entertainment, this lecture did not disappoint. It was one of the most detailed conspiracy theories I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. You must understand, I do believe that the world is going out eventually, and that there will be a Second Coming. But I also know that it's not going to happen when or how we think it will happen, and serving as a missionary in Brownsville, Texas towards the end of the Mayan calendar made me a little sick of speculating. Too many people freaking out, asking us about when the zombies would show up or about the cloud in the shape of the angel of death that appeared over the shooting in Matamoros or the killer tidal wave or "what about the mermaid on discovery channel? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!?" And these individuals were not impressed by our answers of, "Well, the world probably isn't ending and we're really here more to talk about how you can follow Jesus than how the world is going to end". Not to mention that everyone's favorite books in the Bible down there are Psalms and Revelations. (I still don't get it, but I guess people will read those same two books over and over and ignore the rest of the Bible)
Anyway, the point is that I approach anyone telling me how the world is going to end with a certain amount of amused skepticism. This guy does win over the usual stories I heard in Brownsville since he was well dressed and wasn't high, but it was still a little convoluted. Using the Bible, the Book of Mormon, news blogs, dreams that random people have had, and a good old fashioned dash of the Red Scare, he's come up with a timetable of how "They" (ie, the communists, or in other words an alliance between China, Russia, and Iraq) are going to destroy the American dollar and the stock market, get us all on welfare and install Obama as our dictator so that we can get used to communist rule, collapse our civilization so that we all starve to death, and then invade with a gigantic army. He even had an approximate time table for how long each part of their plan is going to take. So what do we do about it? Get a years' supply of food and ammunition. Just before the year long famine and super winter, any person with a years food supply (LDS or not) will receive an invitation from the prophet to go camping for an "indefinite period of time" and it is there, in tent cities up in the mountains, that we will safely wait out the apocalypse.
Yeah. Serious.
One of my favorite parts was am anecdote about a group of elderly gentlemen in Cache valley that he meet with who had all been having scary dreams about the world ending. They asked him, "What do we do with our food storage? In all our dreams, the valley gets flooded."
"Well, what are you doing now?"
"Burying it."
"Well, that's a good idea because Cache Valley will only be flooded for a week." (How does he know this? No idea.)
So then they tell him about a guy who'd been having dreams about the valley flooding, and instead of burying his food and ammunition in his field like his neighbor (who said, I'd like to see "them" find that. For now I'm assuming we're still talking about the communists, who have nothing better to do than dig up a dairy farm looking for food storage.), used his dreams to select a point in the mountains that looked well above the floodline. He picked a spot and started digging, only to find some else had hidden their food storage in the same spot. He took it as a good sign, buried his food 20 feet to the left, and wondered who his new neighbor is going to be.
"Well, what are you doing now?"
"Burying it."
"Well, that's a good idea because Cache Valley will only be flooded for a week." (How does he know this? No idea.)
So then they tell him about a guy who'd been having dreams about the valley flooding, and instead of burying his food and ammunition in his field like his neighbor (who said, I'd like to see "them" find that. For now I'm assuming we're still talking about the communists, who have nothing better to do than dig up a dairy farm looking for food storage.), used his dreams to select a point in the mountains that looked well above the floodline. He picked a spot and started digging, only to find some else had hidden their food storage in the same spot. He took it as a good sign, buried his food 20 feet to the left, and wondered who his new neighbor is going to be.
Anyway, that was the highlight of the event for me. We also had a Green Berret talk to us about self defense (more or less he told us that self defense is American so we should all buy guns. Also the creepy guy sitting behind us kept throwing out weird and violent suggestions like "stab his eye out with a knitting needle". We changed seats.) And an energetic young woman who spent the entire presentation bouncing on a mini trampoline told us that if we want to stay young we need to exercise and if we study a lot we can survive lobotomies. There was also an oven powered by tea lights, and Tara and her sister made me try a free sample of their new favorite hot chocolate (sans grounds). It was slightly more edible but I wouldn't buy it, however many antioxidants it's supposed to have. But, when I looked at the schedule and found myself having to choose between "Gold For the Middle Class" and a thinly disguised ad for essential oils, I decided I'd had enough for the day and left.
So, am I now more prepared as a result of this preparedness expo?
Lets just say that if you find a can of tuna and a slingshot buried in Cache Valley with a note reading "In Case of Apocalypse", it's mine.
Lets just say that if you find a can of tuna and a slingshot buried in Cache Valley with a note reading "In Case of Apocalypse", it's mine.
