Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I was jawboning with a fella the other day and he mentioned something that I thought was amusing enough to repeat. He’s been wading in the shallow end of the preparedness pool for a few years, but only in the last year or so has he jumped into the deep end with both feet. He’s definitely of the opinion that he’s working against the clock on this one. Anyway, when Bin Laden was killed (or not killed, depending on if you have the shiny side or the dull side of the tinfoil on facing inside your hat) a friend of his called him up with the usual opening line of “Have you seen the news? Quick, go turn on your tv!”. He said at that moment he thought his buddy was calling him to tell him that the end of the world had started and all he could think was “Dammit, I’m not ready!” as every little detail he had unfinished came to him in a moment of perfect, clear recall.

I hate those moments.

I had them 1994 when the Assault Weapons Ban went through and I instantly had a mental image of exactly how many ‘high capacity’ magazines I had. And I thought to myself, “I’m not ready for this!” Fortunately, these moments dont happen often and when they turn out to be ‘false alarms’, as in the case of the fella in the first paragraph, it gives us a ‘whew!’ moment where we think we avoided a disaster and maybe we really should put off the vacation to the Grand Canyon this year and sink the money into freeze drieds and solar panels.

Everyone has a different idea about what flavor the apocalypse is going to be. The superstitious say it’ll be based on some religious prophecy (and, hey, howd that work out lately?), the Peak Oil crowd say its happening right now and we all need to go buy mules and leather harnesses for plows, the Scientologists (really a subset of the first group) figure its the Warth Of Xenu, and guys like me figure its a slow economic descent into a Soviet-era style of toilet paper lines and entropic failure. All of them, though, figure that its happening soon.

I’ve been kinda sorta waiting for something to happen for…mmmm…well, quite a while. Sometimes things that I’d think were catalysts for TEOTWAWKI turn out to be nothing, and sometimes stuff I never even considered comes outta left field and makes me think “hmmm…hadnt thought about that”.

So if you got one of those phone calls tomorrow, and you had that momentary flash of insight where all the things you have left undone and on the ‘to do’ list suddenly pop into your head, would you also think “I’m not ready” or would you think youre ‘ready enough’? I’d say we’re not as ready as we could be, but probably ready enough for most situations. There is, naturally, room for improvement.
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Speaking of room for improvement:
Man sacrifices self to save wife in tornado.
This fella is being lionized as an ideal husband who sacrificed himself to save his wife and is a role model that all husbands should emulate.
As my wife would say: WTF?
Lets assume for a moment that the role of the husband in the marriage is indeed to protect the family. Personally, I’m not a big fan of rigid gender roles in a relationship, but your mileage may vary…..however, lets say for the purpose of this discussion, it is the role of the husband to protect the family.
So, did this guy live up to that responsibility? Well, technically, yes. But if he was really going to protect his family, why didnt he take the steps to protect them from the predictable threat of a tornado? Sacrificing your life to save your family is noble, but it shouldnt be “Plan A”. His wife, I’m sure, wishes that his duty to protect her would have been fulfilled by having a stocked storm shelter where she could yell at him later for building that ugly thing in their yard, but at least he’d be alive for her to yell at.

Sure, maybe sometimes theres simply no other options but it sounds like if these people had a small storm shelter to retreat to theyd both be around today.