Much fun has been made of the whole “duct tape and plastic” thing lately, but joking aside, if you haven’t, you really ought to go browse the calm, sensible advice that the good people at ready.gov have made available. Not just because it will, as they point out, help you and your loved ones be better prepared for disasters both man-made and natural, though that’s a perfectly acceptable reason, too. No, I want you to go check it out so you can appreciate the Strangelove-ian idea that permeates it: that our only real duty as citizens is to calmly prepare ourselves and our loved ones for horrors the like of which we’ve never seen, and then, when those horrors come to pass, to seal ourselves in our inner rooms and quietly watch TV to find out what those wise men who have everything under control want us to do next. So go out and buy your plastic sheeting and bottled water, but at the same time, consider this: If these threats are real (and I can’t see any reason to think otherwise), we have another, even more urgent duty: to work with like-minded folks to send our current leaders back where they came from, replacing them with people of more wisdom and less arrogance who can plot a course to a future in which the innocent don’t have to die for stupid reasons like these.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, February 21st, 2003 at 9:19 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.