Constantly see people online talk about “when the robber comes thru my door” or whatever, and some of it is memes, but a lot of it is just people legit discussing what the “best weapon” to fight robbers breaking into your house at night would be - Giving it so much thought as if it is a legitimate concern. So is it? Does it happen a lot?
Upper middle class white devils living in suburbs have a dim awareness of how their lives are situated on a mountain of corpses. Their imagination thus conjures for them an image of lower class rebellion against them. These suburban whites are already paranoid, since they’re caught between two poles. They’re not rich enough to be ghoulish, grinning bourgeoisie, and they’re not desperate enough to identify with the working class. And these are the people who collect the most guns and obsess over home invasion. Not poorer people living in high crime neighborhoods, but sheltered whities in gated communities
So they’re paranoid from two angles. With the capitalist class they’ll concoct wild conspiracy theories about mind control or vaccines. With lower class people, it’s just racist panic over black or Latino people existing.
A lot of the home invasion prepper types also claim they’ll be prepared in the case of a tyrannical government takeover, but I seriously do not believe them. None of them are going to shoot a cop or national guard solider. I don’t remember a single instance of that happening in the midst of covid curfews. Their criteria for when tyranny starts is ridiculous too. Tyranny is just gun control, and that’s it. So long as suburban whitey still has small arms to play with, America is still apparently trucking along just fine.
All true. I’d just add that nonwhite Americans in poor neighborhoods absolutely do own guns as well, mostly for personal protection. They just tend not to fetishize them or own dozens
Damn you’ve just described my dad lol. I always thought it was weird that he seems to be aware that things are unsustainable and will collapse, yet at the same time he concludes that this will lead to “city people flooding into our neighborhoods to steal and kill everything”, and seems to think the solution is to “prep” with food and supplies and fortify his house into a bunker to hide away from everyone, instead of like… working together with community to survive? The more likely thing to happen? But yeah I know now that it’s just the racism talking.
Preppers never made sense even by their own logic. If they’re so worried about a sudden collapse and post-apocalypse raiders coming to steal everything, they’re going to immediately go for stockpiles of food and guns. Yeah, it’s got to be racism. Preppers see their potential enemies (probably caricatured as black/latino gangs) as less than human and less capable of making plans. They see other people as zombies or animals. They can only imagine a future where every single person on Earth is against them, but are also incapable of defeating a single old man in a bunker. It’s a twisted mindset that could only have come from American suburbia.
My uncle is a prepper type too, although he’s slightly more community oriented in a certain way. He’s convinced the apocalypse will be a religious war, with a coalition of atheists coming together to murder all Christians (also when he describes atheists he uses the same terminology and framework that antisemites use when describing Jews). He’s convinced the local Methodist church to build panic rooms and long term storage into their community center, which otherwise just hosts school dances and basketball games. He teaches gun stuff through the church too, and he spends a lot of time gardening and doing carpentry, which he also says will be important. Honestly if the weird racist apocalypse stuff weren’t involved, my uncle would have pretty healthy hobbies and a good relationship with people in his church. It’s too bad he’s also a racist, transphobic lunatic.
I’ve always considered writing a post-apocalyptic story based around this. One where it’s actually a group of survivors doing community outreach that manage to survive and have to deal with violent lone wolf freaks every now and again. Instead of the usual Burgerland story take where the community centred survivors are weak, small bean gentle folk who can’t deal with the harsh reality of the wastelands.