Creatures are preparers.  We’ve all seen the nature videos of animals preparing for childbirth or winter or on-coming disaster.  Human history is rife with evolutionary food storage techniques and fortification against natural and manmade catastrophe.  You’d think, in this high-tech age of problem-solving, that the processes would be more available, more mater-of-fact and, at the very least, instill less panic.  Apparently, we’re not that smart.  When it comes to readiness, squirrels, ants and octopi make us look like the proverbial head-cut-off chickens.

Where I’m writing this, (a couple of days before publication), we’re in the midst of a snow event…maybe 18” by the time it’s done.  It was well-forecast, (imagine that), and most in its path took stock of groceries and gas and heating oil or firewood, batteries, candles and blankets.  There was little anxiety; school is on vacation and a random closing of a road or two will not be problematic.  It’s not a hurricane or a tsunami, an earthquake or a flood or a tornado.  We’ll suffer some minor inconvenience, shovel and snow blow, and get back to it.

So, with the rainy-day gene entwined in our double helixes, how do we continue to be so ill-prepared for socio-religious-political upheaval?  I suppose you have to give mankind a bit of a pass until the 1830’s or so with the introduction of the telegraph.  Until then, news traveled so slowly that any determined tyrant could have a broad sword up your butt before you even knew he hated you and everybody like you.  But today… where everything happens in real time…where we can watch Putin picking out his invasion wardrobe on TikTok, how can anyone say they didn’t see it coming?  Yet, if you’re Ukrainian or Uyghur or, or, or…what exactly do you prepare for after all of the presumably smartest people on the planet can’t figure out how to play nice with one another?

As I listened to the news and the local scuttlebutt about the predicted consequences of today’s snow event in my world, I felt embarrassed by the frivolity of it all.  I mean, I live in the northeast…it snows here…sometimes, a lot.  While in Kyiv, missiles are exploding and scary troops with tanks and advanced weaponry and no regard for the citizens of that still sovereign nation, are advancing and there are no civilian guidelines for how to prepare for that.  It’s all the folly of one crazy, shirtless asshole who has somehow wrestled away absolute power over control of his nation’s policy.  We have one, (or more), of those here, and we could very easily be next.  Prepare!?