Here's Something You Don't See Every Day

Well, actually this is something you never see in Canada. A fallout shelter. I spotted this one at Faneuil Hall Market Place during a visit to Boston earlier this week. I suppose it's some sort of throwback from the Cold War, when people even had bomb shelters buried in their own backyards. I wonder if this place is being maintained and if it still has fully stocked shelves of food and supplies? Or maybe there's some rusty and suspiciously puffy tins of rotting army rations on the shelves. Even the Twinkies would be stale after all this time!! If you look closely at the sign you'll see the shelter offers safety for a mere 100 souls. As I surveyed the area I noticed there were a few more than 100 people lingering about. After all this time is somebody in that building trained in selecting which people get to enter the fallout shelter? Would it be a case of women and children? Let the men stay outside to vapourize in the searing flash of a nuclear fission? So, think about it; there's a nuclear war raging on outside and inside the world's fallout shelters huddle as many women and children as they can hold. The vast majority of people to survive a nuclear attack would be women and children. So after the war, then what? The women and children crawl out of the hole, all bleary-eyed and pale, looking out on a brave new world where the cities have been flattened around them and the soil is practically glowing in radioactivity. What would you do?

If I were there during a nuclear attack, I think I would forgo the option to enter the shelter. It's not that I have a death wish or anything. I very much enjoy life and look forward to a bright and happy future. But I wouldn't want to live through a nuclear war and the ensuing consequences following. Instant vapourization is preferable.

Nowadays I notice that people place their faith in much more simple means; plastic sheets and duct tape. Yea, that'll do it. Safety in plastic wrap. I realize people worry less about a huge nuclear attack these days and instead are more worried about dirty bombs and biological attacks. I'm not exactly sure how effective plastic and duct tape would be at preventing these threats from entering your homes but plastic does keep the meat at the supermarket fresh and clean even during cold and flu season when people are hacking and sneezing over the meat counter, so surely it would work to keep people safe, right? If Will Smith had used plastic sheets to wrap his house up in the movie "I Am Legend" would he still be alive now? Maybe the flesh eating mutants wouldn't have been able to sniff him down if his house was encased in plastic. Now that's something to think about!

I remember a while back there was a TV commercial for some brand of plastic wrap where they had wrapped giant chunks of meat in one brand of plastic wrap and another chunk in the competitor's brand. They then placed both neatly plastic wrapped chunks of meat in a tiger's cage and filmed the action. One chunk of meat was apparently untouched because the tiger couldn't smell the meat through the plastic. However, the tiger hoed right in to the other plastic wrapped meat, devouring it with careless abandonment. In small print, beneath the tiger chewing into the plastic wrapped meat was printed a disclaimer that stated something to the effect of "No plastic was consumed by the tiger". Now, maybe you had to see this commercial to appreciate it but I think most people know what a tiger looks like when he's eating a hunk of raw meat. Nobody is going to walk up to it and say "Excuse me. Allow me to remove the plastic wrapper from your delicious rump roast" and manage to walk away without looking like Roy Horn. That tiger on the commercial ate that plastic wrap. But that's the beauty of plastic and that's why we have faith that it will protect us if we duct tape it over our windows and doors. The versatility and strength of duct tape is world renown and if a tiger can ingest plastic and later poop it out without it being damaged beyond a few teeth marks, think how wonderful a job it'll do at keeping us safe against all manner of attack! If it can survive the bowels of a tiger it can survive pretty much anything. So have faith, America! At 3:00am, when that phone rings 3M and the Dow Chemical Company will be there to answer the call!