Wer're gonna need a bigger list. That was the first thought as I surveyed the assembled items.
Like a good citizen I had just followed the advice of the previously little-known ‘EU Commissioner for Preparedness and Crisis Management’, Hadja Lahbib.
Last week Commissioner Lahbib went viral when she urged 450 million Europeans to stockpile vital supplies in case of an imminent disaster. How imminent and which disaster is anyone’s guess these days.
The commissioner recommended water, tinned food, matches, a torch and a deck of cards which were located easily enough. A more rigorous search was required to locate a 40 year-old Swiss army knife salvaged from the sale of my old family home.
There was no cash in the house as suggested so that entailed a trip to the ATM, today’s equivalent of making a call from an old street phone box.
Pride of place in the assembled kit was an old FM/AM radio, a gift from a Christmas that time forgot, in the days before tech firms discovered ‘built-in obsolescence’ was a licence to print money.
Surveying it, the assembled EU survival kit made for a sad little inventory.
It started to look even more meagre when the madman in the White House decided to unleash what analysts have called the threat of “economic nuclear winter.”
He sent the world order teetering on its axis as colonies of remote penguins and Amazonian tribes who have never encountered the outside world woke up to find they had been tariffed back to the stone age.
But as a keen observer of the ongoing collapse of things, this column was of course already ahead of the game when it comes to survival stockpiling.
I previously lamented how my annual trip to the dump has been ruined by the threat of apocalypse, because you never know what items you should keep for the next crisis.
Indeed I am happy to add some essentials to Commissioner Lahbib’s list from a quick perusal of the garden shed.
Like the chicken wire I kept in the event of a 'Last Of Us' style zombie apocalypse or the descent of society into a Mad Max road warrior culture (well, I live not too far from Conor McGregor).
The children’s sleds that will be invaluable when climate change shuts down the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current and heralds a new mini ice age.
The rusty, buzz saw blade, patio set umbrella and old lawnmower engine that I think can be fashioned - ET style - into a transmitter when the grid goes offline.
An old Leaving Cert edition of Charles Dickens 19th century classic Hard Times to act as an idiot’s guide to the new idiot age of Trumpenomics.
The anti-radiation, iodine tablet pack issued by the Irish government in the 1990s to much hilarity - to be taken now after consuming imported glow-in-the-dark US chicken once it succeeds in overthrowing pesky EU food regulations.
An old 2002 ‘Punt to Euro’ calculator which can be reprogrammed to determine how much your pension is now worth in bitcoin to the nearest zero.
But even with these upgrades, it’s hard to shake the sad look off the average EU citizen’s doomsday kit.
Especially when you know how the other ‘one percent’ are preparing.
In his recent book ‘Survival of the Richest’, author Douglas Rushkoff revealed an extraordinary meeting he had with a group of billionaires who had sought his expertise as a “futurist”.
Having been flown to a desert to meet these “ultra-wealthy stakeholders” as they described themselves, he assumed they wanted to quiz him on things like the future economy.
Instead they were eager to talk about a different dilemma: did he think their plans to sit out the collapse of society in their luxury bunkers would work?
Specifically, would the armed militias they planned to hire to keep desperate people out, turn on them or stay loyal?
Rushkoff recommended their best defence would be to start looking after the glue that holds society together before it collapses in the first place.
To stockpile things like solidarity, decency, democracy and the rule of law might prove more useful than batteries and Swiss army knives in the long run.
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