There are things you don’t expect a modern government to tell you. Keep some cash in the house. Store drinking water. Keep food you can eat without electricity. Own a radio that works when everything else doesn’t. That used to be your grandmother talking — the woman who saved aluminum foil and considered an empty cupboard a character defect. Now it’s governments.
Britain’s “Be Ready” campaign tells households to prepare for three days of disruption: water, food, essential medicines, flashlights, a battery or wind-up radio, important documents, and cash in case electronic payments fail. Germany recommends ten days. The European Commission wants every household in Europe able to manage at least 72 hours on its own, and Sweden has dusted off its Cold War pamphlet — rewritten for today — reminding citizens that in a war, they have a duty to help.
And it isn’t just Europe. On September 30, the Secretary of War signed a memo creating something called Fortress: every major military base in the continental United States must be able to run for 90 days with no outside help — its own power, water, fuel, food and communications — and some bases will get their own small nuclear reactors. The Pentagon’s spokesman explained why, and the quote deserves attention: “In the next major war, global supply chains will break.” If you remember COVID’s empty shelves, you have seen the preview.
Closer to home, the Army has placed an air defense system on a barge in the Intracoastal Waterway outside Mar-a-Lago, in plain view of anyone driving down Southern Boulevard — put there and run by NORAD at the request of the Secret Service. Governments do not harden their bases and guard their waterways because everything is fine.
Now — the warning is real. The exact disaster is optional. Nobody honest is telling you war starts Thursday. Miami, of all places, should understand this, because we rehearse it every hurricane season. A storm takes your power, a cyberattack takes the card readers, a broken water main takes your faucet, and suddenly the checklist stops sounding like grandma and starts sounding like common sense. One fallen utility pole can ruin a perfectly good Tuesday.
Our grandparents knew this in their bones. Tell them “that can’t happen again” and they would look at you the way you’d look at a child explaining that the stove probably wasn’t hot anymore. They had already met “can’t happen.” It had taken their job. We have better technology now, and we depend on far more of it. A smartphone with a dead battery is an expensive little mirror.
So do the unglamorous things. Keep cash in small bills — a hundred-dollar bill may impress someone, but a handful of smaller bills actually buys breakfast when the terminals are down. Build toward a couple of weeks of ordinary food, a little at a time: when you need one can of tuna, buy two. Food you will actually eat on an ordinary Wednesday, not mystery survival products. Store water, keep a jug in the freezer, don’t reach the last pill before arranging the refill, and put your documents where you can find them under stress. And yes — keep a manual can opener. There is something magnificently modern about owning three voice assistants and being defeated by a can of beans. Check on the older neighbor while you’re at it; a functioning neighborhood is preparedness, too.
In six days, we vote. That vote will not stop any of this, though it may slow some of it down — and the people who have told us plainly what they intend to do should be taken at their word. That is not scaring anyone into a voting booth. It is the truth arriving early, for once.
Keep living your life. Make the holiday plans, argue about football, enjoy dinner. Just brace a little. On your next grocery trip, pick up a few things that would make a difficult week easier. Governments are telling people to prepare — for once, take the useful advice. Grandma already left us the instructions. We were just too busy ordering dinner through an app to read them.
“Civilization is a marvelous thing, but I wouldn’t trust it so completely that I forgot to buy a manual can opener.” — YNOT
This editorial is a Miami version of a longer essay first published at In Search of Your Passions: “Something wicked this way comes… and it is not me saying it”.
