Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Author:Ted Koppel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

13

The Ark Builders

It’s like the ants and the grasshoppers, and how they froze to death because they didn’t prepare.

— ALAN MATHENY, PREPPER

For the most part, public reaction to the possibility of a massive cyberattack has not even risen to the level of apathy. Apathy suggests the awareness of a problem and the decision not to worry about it. We’re not there yet. To the degree that government and its disaster relief operations focus our attention at all, they direct it toward the familiar: natural disasters common to our region, or variations on terrorist attacks that have already occurred. Perhaps by definition, preparation for the unknown requires a generic approach.

There is, in any event, a growing movement around the country based on the assumption that neither government agencies nor private relief organizations can be relied upon in the event of any major disaster. A generation or two ago, they might have been called survivalists, but there was an extreme rightwing aura attached to that term, conjuring images of bunkers built to sustain life against aerial bombardment. While such groups continue to exist, they have been modified and largely displaced by a much larger group for whom ideology is less relevant. “Preppers,” perhaps most easily described as “those who prepare,” can be found across the political spectrum. They are not necessarily prophets of doom, simply those who want to be ready for the worst. As such, they are accustomed to a measure of mockery; they are, after all, only rarely proved right. Dealing with daily life is complicated enough without trying to anticipate and prepare for the hypothetical, no matter how extreme the catastrophe, no matter how unimpeachable the evidence.

In that sense, at least, today’s preppers are direct descendants of one of the Old Testament’s most famous prophets. Indeed, it is not unusual for preppers to cite his example. It may be unfashionable to link catastrophic disaster to God’s judgment, but how interesting it is that Genesis, that bare-bones account of the very earliest days of existence, has no sooner laid the foundation for our journey into history than it diverts into an account of total annihilation. If nothing else, the story of Noah provides evidence that mankind has always been troubled by an undercurrent of worry that what is at present cannot last. Noah is an everlasting reproach to the cynics who mock the ark builders.

Our notions of time may differ from biblical accounts, but Genesis tells us that with only seven days notice of a flood that would cover the earth to the peaks of its highest mountains, Noah built an ark. Genesis is silent on the matter of where Noah acquired the tools, the wood, and the vast quantities of tar with which he sealed the interior and exterior of his enormous ship. Where details are provided, they stagger the imagination. Noah was six hundred years old when God alerted him to the impending cataclysm (although this was, relatively speaking, the prime of life; his grandfather Methuselah died at the age of 969).

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