perfidy

Over the years we ministers have talked a pretty big game about preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Or the Ende Tymes. Or the alien conquest. Or Fimbulvintr, heralding the march of the dread Jotun from icy, misted Niflheim to join the hosts of Ragnarok, the final battle of Gods and Men that will destroy the universe.

All the time, we’re talking about this stuff, but now we’re starting to do it.

Mostly.

What I did was finally prepare an undead/alien/fire/water/Valhalla emergency kit.

Three, in fact.

Let me lay out my thinking on preparedness. As with most of my thinking, it’s simple: to a significant extent, you are responsible for your own health, your own safety, and the security of your property. Leaving those things solely to agents of the state, meaning any gubmint agency from the local dogcatcher up through Homeland Security, is quite dumb.

There, I said it.

Even when it is a warm June Saturday where all is right with the world, when everything is rainbows and puppies and the single anvil-hued thunderhead that brewed up from the west took one look at the saccharine sweetness of that perfect day and imploded, choosing to choke on its own rain and dissolve in a moist suicide instead of marring the perfect-est day ever dreamed of by a fairy princess on her wedding day. Even on days like that, leaving your security to the state is dumb.

Don’t misread me, here- I’m a pretty far cry from organizing my militia to sortie from our Idaho compound and destroy the ZOG when the seventh seal is opened or whatever. I’m talking about taking a little responsibility for looking after what’s yours. Or, if you choose to leave your fate to bureaucrats, at least have the courtesy not to bitch when they blow it.

However, it must also be said that, at least in my case, I will not be able to last long without outside help of some sort. There is just no way that I have the knowledge or budget to prepare for an indefinite period of living outside of at least rudimentary society.

So I was faced with two opposite ends of the preparedness spectrum: do nothing, and hope that the feds will arrive quickly and administer relief effectively; vs do everything, and get myself a portable machine shop, decontamination shower, training in 4 or 5 urgently applicable disciplines with an M.D. to boot, a few thousand gallons of fuel and potable water, enough food to last the rest of my life, and a secure underground lair to store all that.

Plainly, each of those opposite ends is laughably unlikely. My thinking on preparedness led me to develop a mission concept that split the difference: prepare for a week of self-sufficiency. That would allow enough time for a natural disaster response to begin, and more than enough time for a smaller localized event- fire, flood- to be sorted out. Admittedly in the case of permanent upheaval I’m in a tough spot, but then so aren’t we all.