Locking the Bunker Door

Ted Koppel's book, Lights Out, discusses at length the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to a cyber attack. He walks through a hypothetical situation where such an attack has occurred, and traces out how it will impact people in the days and months that follow. In exploring the type of doomsday preparation that would be necessary to survive the aftermath, Koppel explores the Mormon church's teachings on preparing for disasters in such a way as to maintain self-reliance during an emergency. 

In the course of describing how impressively Mormons have made doomsday preparations, he indulges in some speculation about the moral crisis he believes that faithful Mormons will face when doomsday finally comes, because there is an inherent conflict between the Mormon belief in loving your neighbor as you love yourself, and the Mormon belief in self-reliance and preparedness. Because when you find yourself in the position of guarding a bunker full of the only available sustenance for miles around and the earth has become blighted and food scarce, how do you treat the people outside of your bunker? Do you give them food, or do you lock your door?

Koppel raises this ethical dilemma with real earnestness, because he believes it is one that we all will face in our lifetimes if we are lucky enough to survive a doomsday scenario. But I think we are already living through the early days of such a scenario, and that we all refuse collectively to see it, because the scope of it is so horrific. There is currently a vast migration of suffering humans across vast distances on the planet. They are leaving their homes because of gang violence which is escalating due to food shortages. And it is all happening because of climate change. Portions of the planet are becoming slowly uninhabitable for humans, and a large portion of our fellow human beings are fleeing to cooler climates as a result. Right now, they are heading north to places like the United States, and they are seeking a refuge from a warming planet that will no longer sustain them where they came from. 

We are living the doomsday scenario already, and thus far, the United States' official answer to these suffering throngs of humanity who are falling down at our door, is, "Go away." We are locking the door of our bunker, because we have never imagined this situation and have no governmental apparatus for dealing with it. No vision for what is to come or how we can intelligently and thoughtfully address it. It is just too big for us to see, so we fall back on false narratives about who these people are and why they continue to journey to our borders at great peril even though they know that if they survive, they also face unimaginable horrors at the hands of our current system. It remains the only alternative to certain death.

I don't hear any kind of public dialogue about whether locking the bunker door is really the best strategy for humanity as a whole to figure out some kind of plan to save ourselves. My hunch is that an honest and open discussion would lead to the conclusion that it's really probably not the best plan we can come up with.