Let me set the scene: a dinner party in Manhattan, the guests mostly conservatives of varying degrees of intensity, and the midterms had just happened. So you can imagine the mood. Every topic arrived at the table already cast in gloom. Somebody’s exotic Christmas holiday plans were delivered in a tone that suggested forced migration. The news of somebody’s new grandchild was greeted by “Congratulations, I guess,” implying a kind of Who wants to bring a child into a world with a Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer?
So when one guest mentioned that the British government had just told every household in the United Kingdom to keep three days of water and non-perishable food on hand, the table perked up the way gloomy people do when they’re handed some fresh new catastrophe to fret about.
What do they know? That was the question. Why now? What aren’t they telling us?
Within 10 minutes, we had nuclear winter, a zombie apocalypse, a software bug that disables every cash machine in the country, and the beginning of a martial-law societal breakdown as a ruthless government enforces its woke agenda.
Here’s what I learned later, when I Googled the terms “UK govt disaster prep thing”: The U.K. government’s campaign is called, with the directness of a British nanny, “Be Ready.” It launched on Oct. 22 as the first phase of a three-year national effort, which is not the timetable of a government expecting the end of the world next Tuesday. What they expect, according to the press release, is unglamorous local flooding that knocks out the power and the water.
Which happens. I lived in California for about 30 years, and in those years, I experienced torrential rains that knocked out power lines, earthquakes that broke water mains, fires that choked the sky with smoke, riots that shut the city down, Oscar night traffic, and the O.J. Simpson trial. A nearly complete Encyclopedia of Disruptive Disasters. Most of my neighbors and I kept storage boxes stocked with gallon jugs of water, canned tuna, freeze-dried coffee, Sterno cans, and vacuum-sealed Snickers bars.
We each had our own variations. Some of us (me) swapped out the water for Maker’s Mark. My neighbor Tim preferred Vienna sausages to tuna. But everyone remembered the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which knocked out ATMs all over town, so we all kept a wad of cash tucked in with the provisions.
So, I told my dinner companions, the British government doesn’t need secret knowledge of some coming collapse. Life is full of ordinary, run-of-the-mill collapses of civilization, plenty to make it worth keeping some Vienna sausages, two hundred dollars in twenties, and a bottle of bourbon in the back of a closet.
I think they heard me, and for a moment the atmosphere at the table was a bit more upbeat. But what I didn’t tell them is what happens to the box.
The first time someone comes to the door and needs cash, whether it’s the guy who trims the trees or the woman who delivers the tamales on Sunday, you dive into the box and promise yourself you’ll replenish it later when you have a moment to go to the ATM. The coffee goes the same way — early morning, sudden realization you’re out of the good stuff — and the tuna goes whenever you’re hungry and lazy, which, for some of us, is a permanent state. My neighbor Tim ate his Vienna sausages within a week of packing them. “Turns out they’re delicious!” he told me. “I just had a craving!”
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The U.K. government probably doesn’t know this, but that’s the flaw in every emergency kit. It’s built for the big disaster, the one that might never come. Meanwhile, the small ones arrive every day, at the front door and in the pantry, and they’re the ones that empty the box. Ordinary life is already an emergency. It just moves slowly enough that we don’t call it one.
As for the Maker’s Mark, I don’t need to explain, do I? Bourbon, as I’m sure you know, is the solution to a lot of life’s disasters, not just the natural ones.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.