Meandering through Costco last week, I took a long hard look at a product I never seriously considered in previous visits: the instant emergency food supply bucket. Anyone else have a similar reaction lately?

I recall a few years ago, during Trump I, when he was trading nuclear threats with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. It was a bit unsettling for a few days. I sent messages to the kids encouraging them to take a few simple steps: fill the cars up with gas, get a few hundred bucks cash out of the ATM, have a bunch of batteries on hand and a battery-operated radio available, and have a few jugs of water stashed in the pantry or the garage.

When the possibility of trading nukes moves from “remote” to merely “fairly unlikely,” those seem like reasonable and easily achievable precautions to take. You might consider having a few extra rolls of duct tape as well (to seal up windows and doors if you end up in a radioactive fallout area). We learned from Covid that it doesn’t take much to muck up modern supply chains and that there’s a fairly low threshold for your fellow citizens to start engaging in panic buying (TP seems to be the first item to fly off the shelves).

Now, during Trump II, he is trading threats with whoever is calling the shots in Iran at the moment — it is very unclear from media reports who that actually is. And there is nothing “remote” or “unlikely” about this scenario — we’re already in the middle of it. Perhaps you have noticed your own “it’s getting worse” developments over the last week or so. Here are my recent items:

  • Gas keeps going up. I paid $5.39 a gallon in California last week, and that was for the cheap stuff at Costco.
  • Prices in general at the grocery store have gone up again. It sure seems like everything is a dollar or two more in just the last couple of weeks.
  • ICE agents now patrolling airports.
  • An online lecture course I am following, two lectures per week, went offline. Because the lecturer is in Israel and apparently kept having to evacuate to shelters when missile sirens went off.
  • There is simply no good news when you check your favorite media sites. Every. Single. Story. about what’s going on in Iran and the Persian Gulf is either bad or very bad. Statements from US officials about developments and plans are, at best, incoherent. The conflict is widening. It is definitely, assuredly, going to get worse.

What are regular people like you and me supposed to do? It’s not like we can change anything at the global level. Writing letters to your idiot senator or representative is pointless. We’re just passengers on the crazy train. So we do things like buying batteries, stashing cash in a dresser drawer, and pondering whether to purchase a big bin of emergency food. How did it come to this?

Let’s share observations and plans.

  • Have you purchased any emergency essentials this week?
  • Do you share a sense of foreboding about the future?
  • Any family members in the military that you are concerned about?
  • When do you think things will things get back to normal? Or is “normal” something we are never getting back to?
  • General Conference in four days. Do you expect any speaker to directly address current events and threatening possibilities? Or give any specific counsel to the membership about our current situation? Or will it just be the usual set of recycled topics, stories, and travel reports?

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