Like the Rest

Sitting, staring as the microwave rotates a box of pre-made Thai food, I feel fear for a moment. I look down at the spread before me, plastic-wrapped and sealed for my convenience. I realize I am not as strong as I need to be, relying on packaged and hermetically contained food to sustain me. Even I am prepackaged, sealed with a desiccate and irradiated. I can't live like this, eating formed meals out of cardboard boxes and foil-wrapped individual packages. If you are what you eat, we are completely unnatural. Salads and steaks even come in plastic now, nitrogen sealed to stave off nature. The Consumer has eradicated the Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer, killed them off one by one, in a blind genocidal torrent of self-satisfaction, immediate gratification and comfort-of-use. This fear, this inability to satiate myself without modern conveniences, comes from generations before me. I have never planted a seed in the ground with the intention of growing something I can eat. People lived in the same deserts for thousands of years before the Europeans came, where we now live with Interstates, infrastructure and multi-national chains of food distributors. Modern man cannot take care of himself, he relies on a despised minority to produce his food, package it, ship it, stock it, and bag it for him. Your average North American male could not figure out how to grow enough corn to make flour from before he starved to death. I cannot become this. I cannot live like this. Maybe this is why I crave the end of civilization; all the chaff of humanity will be blown away when the world is tossed and only the hardy with survive the fall. The useless of society wouldn't last more than a few weeks without 24-hour grocery stores to cater to their every consumerist whim. I hope I would survive. Create what I need, and rely on nothing but my own ingenuity. I cannot become like the rest. I want to be a survivor, not a customer.