Americans need to get a grip, drop gas mask

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 30, 2001

Somebody might get the last laugh on this one while stepping over my dead body, but I refuse to be moved by the hysterical belief that giving some huckster hundreds of dollars for a war surplus gas mask and a chemical warfare protective suit will make my life any safer than it is right now.

What it will actually do is make the people rich who are profiting off of fear and ignorance.

The day after the World Trade Center and Pentagon and Pennsylvania disasters, I heard a guy on a national radio show hawking gas masks, protective suits and other survival gear. This was before the government helped out by temporarily grounding crop dusters.

I'm not knocking that move; it was a necessary one that made as much sense as the temporary grounding of commercial and general aviation flights.

But the concept that something you can buy in a military surplus store or from some gouger on the Internet can save your life is more comforting than practical.

Different gas masks are designed for different agents. Some agents penetrate the skin, in which case a mask will be of no help. The supply of surplus masks goes back to the 1950s, meaning many of them are far past their prime. They are all, incidentally, designed for adults, most of them for clean-shaven adult men. That means they are completely useless for some women and most children and men with beards.

Look for further marketing of creams and gels that are supposed to protect you from agents that penetrate the skin and self-injectors full of atropine, which works as a protection against some nerve gas agents.

A world full of infinite threats (and the number of biological and chemical possibilities can be made to seem infinite in number) is also a world filled with infinite profit possibilities. If someone doesn't get a grip, we're all going to be carrying suitcases full of devices and antidotes of real or imagined effectiveness.

And, more important, we will be contributing to the success of the terrorist attacks. Lives will be further disrupted, our sense of security as a nation more damaged and our trust in our neighbors (an amazing number of bomb shelters have steel doors and multiple locks) of less comfort than it is now and always should be.

Before terrorism became a tool of modern warfare, we as a nation managed to terrorize ourselves with only moderate help from our enemies. The attack on Pearl Harbor led us to unconstitutionally incarcerate thousands of our fellow citizens, and the Russians had us building bomb shelters, listening to air raid sirens and stockpiling food well into the 1960s.

I grew up in a home that always had a box of canned goods ready to throw onto the back of our neighbor's swamp buggy because when the dreaded commie attack came we were all going to head for the Everglades and eat Dinty Moore beef stew. We never really figured out what would come after that, but we were going to face it on full stomachs.

Every week in school we huddled under our desks with one forearm over our eyes to "protect" us from being blinded by the flash of a nuclear explosion and the other across the back of our necks to save us from being decapitated by falling glass. Today everyone would be aghast at presenting our children with the imagery of being blinded and decapitated. It was considered good training then.

In the early 1970s, the gas lines led, or strongly contributed to, the survivalist movement that had people taking powdered protein, sprouted wheat, canned water and some very strange political, social and religious philosophies into hidden bunkers surrounded with barbed wire to keep their beloved neighbors out.

One guy I interviewed back then insisted that I spread the word that everyone had to put all of their money into gold because it was the only thing that would have any value after what he was sure was imminent worldwide economic collapse.

The government wants you to spend money to help the economy.

There are better places to spend it than with the merchants of fear.

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