Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

We're just fragile machines programmed with a false sense of our own importance. And every now and then the universe sends a reminder that we don't really matter to it...

We make fun of those we're most scared of becoming.

God is on the side of the winner.

That's how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they're on the moral high ground

True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you're doing.

Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

In the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, just before making a fateful decision, one character says to another, “There must be a principle: never do anything that can’t be undone.” That principle is why, on the brink of a big decision, the first thing to fill my mind is doubt. What separates the strong from the weak, I reminded myself as I wandered sticker-shocked through the streets of Basseterre, is the ability to act instead of spending most of life paralyzed, too scared to make a choice that might be wrong.

Tomas didn’t hesitate to respond. He’d probably known the answer long before he ever came to America. “It’s not about freedom,” he replied. “America is one of the least-free countries in the Western world. Things are so controlled here compared to Europe.” I had no idea what was coming next. Why would he want to become an American citizen if it wasn’t for the freedom? Perhaps it was simply because his friends were here. “I wanted to become a citizen for the opportunities,” he finally continued. “In the Czech Republic, I had no future. In America, anything is possible. Anyone can become whatever he wants. It’s all happening here. There are a million different paths and choices and careers open to everyone who lives in America. And no matter what happens politically, they can’t take that away.” Everyone at the table fell silent. The truth has a way of doing that to people sometimes.

Rather than having actual freedom, it seemed that, like animals in a habitat in the zoo, we had only the illusion of freedom. As long as we didn't try to leave the cage, we'd never know we weren't actually free.

Death is a guillotine blade hanging over our heads, reminding us every second of every day that this life we treasure so much is no more important to the universe than those of the two hundred thousand insects each of us kills with the front of our car every year.

A lot of people are driven by the belief that they’re special, that they matter, that there is a reason why they’re here. And they’re sustained by their motivation to have this belief affirmed, which is why when someone challenges it, they want to take them down, whether through gossip, ostracism, aggression, or terrorism. To me, that sounds like a lot of work and not much fun. All I believe is what I know for certain: that I’m alive, so I might as well make the most of it. And I’m driven by the simple fact that I hate leaving things unfinished.

I’ve spoken to people in Rwanda who survived the genocide. And I’ve spoken to people who’ve survived acts of God, like in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. And I’ve found that suffering usually draws people closer to God and gives them more faith. I think that the main driver in the human spirit is hope. Man can endure anything if he has hope.” I was reminded of Man’s Search for Meaning, the book Viktor Frankl wrote about surviving Nazi concentration camps, and how he said that the most important survival skill to have was faith. As he put it, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.

The time was 7:40 A.M. I reached for the phone. “Do you have your axe?” came the voice on the other end. It was Mad Dog. “Yes.” “Is your axe sharp?” “No, but I can sharpen it while you’re driving here.” “How about your knife?” “Got it.” “Everything needs to be nice and sharp.

This was why only the uptight, small-minded kids in school got involved in politics, I thought. It’s not about changing the world. It’s still about what lunch table you sit at.

[...] on every highway, there's a drunk driver hurtling at 80 miles an hour in two tons of steel. In every neighbourhood, there's a thief armed with a deadly weapon. In every city, there's a terrorist with a bloody agenda. In every nuclear country, there's a government employee sitting in front of a button. In every cell in our body, there's the potential to mutate into cancer. They are all trying to kill us. And they don't even know us. They don't care if they succeed, we will never know what tomorrow holds for us.

Back then, I had no idea that I’d ever feel unsafe in America or be preparing for disaster myself. We seemed to stand monolithic and invulnerable at the center of the political, cultural, and moral universe, unchallenged as the world’s lone superpower. For

The day the results of the 2004 election were announced was the first time I seriously considered leaving America. I felt alienated from the majority of the country, worried about the damage four more years of the same administration would do, and concerned about a backlash from the rest of the world. Recently, I’d left the New York Times, hoping to move on to bigger and better things. But those things hadn’t come. And now, more than ever, I doubted myself. At the newspaper I’d been thought of as the young guy, with my finger on the pulse of popular culture. But the election had proven that my finger wasn’t on the pulse. I was just feeling the surface of the skin and imagining a heartbeat that wasn’t actually there.

It’s weird, though. When someone wants me to meet them somewhere, my first reaction is to get stressed out and think, Fuck, I can’t.” “So what do you do to get over that?” “I just get in the car and drive,” she said, as if the solution had been that simple all along. “But why are you able to do that now when you couldn’t before?” “Because now that I’ve had more practice driving, I’m confident,” she answered as she careened over a speed bump and landed with a thump in the parking lot. “I trust myself now.” Funny, I thought—that’s exactly how I felt after practicing the survival skills I’d learned. Though, hopefully, I was a better survivalist than she was a driver.

When I returned home, I opened the copy of the Bible I’d bought while researching the millennial doomsdayers and stashed the money inside. The page happened to be Proverbs 27: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.” I didn’t take it as a sign, though—there’s an apt prophecy on nearly every page of the Bible. It is, after all, the original survivalist manual, full of righteous men fleeing floods, fires, plagues, genocides, and tyrants.

Maybe that’s why the Serbians had so many anti-American postcards. Though the Clinton administration’s decision to bomb noncivilian targets had helped to end the genocidal Slobodan Milosevic regime, the U.S. had taken the moral high ground. The problem with that is it leaves someone else on the moral low ground, and being put down there is so repellent to human nature that the only solution is to claim a different moral high ground yourself. This is how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they’re on the moral high ground.

The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama captured the spirit of the time best in his 1989 essay “The End of History.

The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you.

Kevin Mason, a fireman with Fire Station 88 in Los Angeles, paced back and forth, agitated, in a back room of the First Presbyterian Church in Encino. He was tall, with gray hair and the hardened humor of someone who’d seen people die in his arms. “If there’s a big disaster,” he was saying, “you cannot expect assistance for how many days?” “Three to five days,” forty people recited in a staggered response. “You cannot count on us,” Mason continued. By us, he meant the fire department, the police, the ambulance companies, the national guard—anyone. “So who’s going to get you when there’s an emergency?” “Nobody,” the class thundered. “Nobody’s coming to your aid in a disaster,” Mason said, drilling the point into the head of every student, businessperson, housewife, and grandparent in the room. “You have to be independent.

She was a nineteen-year-old student. She sang, played piano, and went to church every Sunday. Today, there was a C.E.M.P. call-out to Northridge, where an SUV sped through a red light and hit her as she was crossing the street. Her body flew several dozen feet through the air before landing face-first on the ground. The jewelry she was wearing clattered across the intersection. The artwork she was carrying scattered in the wind. She seemed talented. She seemed smart. She seemed generous. She never had a chance. It could have just as easily been me. It could have just as easily been you. But it was her. Tomorrow, though, is another day. THE PARTING WORDS OF THE FISHWIFE SIDUR TO GILGAMESH: “When the heavenly gods created human beings, they kept everlasting life for themselves and gave us death. So, Gilgamesh, accept your fate. Each day, wash your head, bathe your body, and wear clothes that are sparkling fresh. Fill your stomach with tasty food. Play, sing dance, and be happy both day and night. Delight in the pleasures that your wife brings you, and cherish the little child who holds your hand. Make every day of your life a feast of rejoicing! This is the task that the gods have set before all human beings. This is the life you should seek, for this is the best life a mortal can hope to achieve.

The first person we saw when we entered the building was Muhammad Ali, perhaps a perfect symbol for the decade to come - a former powerhouse battling a degenerative disease.

The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you. Nothing ever turns out the way you expect. I suppose that’s why I write nonfiction. If this were a movie, the organization would already have traced my number, bugged my phone, and kidnapped my brother. Instead I was being transferred to the publicist and media relations executive for a death cult.

After eavesdropping for a while, I began to realize that all my life I’d been a hypocrite. As a journalist I’d always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn’t the founding fathers’ vision of America I was fighting for—it was just my personal opinion.

So three days before the millennium, Bianca called. “D’ya wanna go to the White House with Trisha and me?” By Trisha, she meant country singer Trisha Yearwood, whose record label, MCA, she’d recently been hired to work at. “When would that be, exactly?” I asked. “For that Millennium Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a party at the White House after and all.” She always talked like she was chewing gum between words. “They’re flying us there in a private jet. Ya don’t need to write about it. Just come as Trisha’s guest. It’ll be fun.” “Shit, I’m supposed to go ice-skating with some guys who think the world’s going to end. Give me a day to figure things out and I’ll get right back to you.

Something changed in me, as it did for many people, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It felt like the day I first beat my father at arm wrestling. In that moment, I realized that he could no longer protect me. I had to take care of myself. An anarchist is someone who believes that people are responsible enough to maintain order in the absence of government. That week, I realized I was something very different: a Fliesian. I began to subscribe to the view of human nature depicted in the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies. After reading reports of the chaos, violence, and suffering in New Orleans, it became clear that when the system is smashed, some of us start smashing each other. Most survivalists are also Fliesians. That’s why they stockpile guns. They’re planning to use them not to shoot enemy soldiers, but to shoot the neighbors trying to steal their supplies.

Forti said he’d spent the last seven years traveling around the world to see how different cultures responded to what he believed were the five major questions of existence: 1. What concerns you the most in life? 2. What does it mean to live a good, fulfilled life? 3. What’s the problem with mankind and what’s the solution? (Interestingly, Forti added, out of nearly a thousand interviews in over a hundred different cultures, no one replied that there was no problem with mankind.) 4. What happens after you die? 5. If there’s a God, what’s he like?