Well, I hope you have all added torches, batteries, candles, camping stoves and clockwork radios to your Christmas lists, in accordance with the deputy prime minister’s (Oliver Dowden, to save you those few seconds of fumbling in the mental dark) push to prepare the nation for – to hear him tell it – imminent catastrophic power failures. The kind brought about by climate change, or cyberattacks, or yet more physical terrorism by hostile foreign forces that will bust us back to more or less medieval times quicker than you can say “Hang on – why is this kettle not working?”
I paraphrase, but not by much. Dowden reckons that we have all become too reliant on modern devices and is launching a – um – website next year on how we can all become more analogue in order to increase our “personal resilience” before the weather or our non-pals around the world decide to destroy the undersea cables, server farms, power plants and/or transformers on which we – so thoughtlessly – depend.
Now, I am at heart a prepper. If I lived in America, where the land, the constitution and the lingering Manifest Destiny mindset all works in favour of doing so, I would currently be putting the finishing touches to the blueprints for my bunker in Montana and setting out to start digging with the rest of my off-grid community in the New Year. But even I, with my natural prepper sympathies, look at this latest government initiative and wish only to blow its turdulent self and all its creators to kingdom come.
I mean – what utter, arrant nonsense. Even a populace long trained in the art of accepting as individual burdens that which can only properly be provided by the state must see the palpable absurdity of the suggestion.
Yes, the days in which Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) were there to raise money for little extras for their schools instead of teachers’ actual salaries are gone. The era in which people did not have to crowdfund for specialist operations or legal defence fees is rapidly passing.
The dawn of a new age is here, in which we all try to mitigate a cost of living crisis partially caused by the simple, untrammelled greed of the food and finance industries by shopping at seven supermarkets a week in search of bargains and hoping that the landlord won’t evict us because he can’t find anyone else who can pay the rent either.
In a pandemic, where your only and absolute duty was to protect the citizenry, doctors and nurses bought their own PPE while companies were given contracts to supply crap, and an unforgivable number of people died because you didn’t have a clue, let alone a plan.
And even after that, trying to tell us that a Maglite is all we need to mitigate the effects of the Russians wiping out our electrical and digital infrastructure remains a strikingly impressive attempt at gaslighting. (Not that we’ll even have gaslight, of course. And it’ll be flaming tarred sticks or nothing once those batteries give out.)
Personal resilience. Personal resilience. What a mockery there is in that phrase, what bulging contempt. Do you know what, in the final analysis, the job of government is, whatever its political stripe? It’s the creation of national resilience. Do you know how you do that?
You invest – continuously, generously, intelligently – in electrical and digital infrastructure for a start. You build in protections and redundancies on a vast, expensive scale very much outside the reach of the individual or even the most efficient PTA. And you perform a very similar process with everything else. Your health service, your legal system, your education system, to take three examples entirely not at random. You could go a little further and, say, invest in restructuring a police force whose recruiting and vetting systems seem of late to be creating more rather than less danger to the public. You could build houses, maybe even to some kind of enforced standard, for people to live in, securely, for ages. You could stand firm against the erosion of women’s rights instead of leaving half the population exposed on a hill as the winds of murderous risk blow ever colder.
You could stop the funneling of taxpayer funds to government members that destroys an electorate’s faith in the whole process of democracy and sends them seeking succour in alternative ideologies whose apparent moral clarity and strength obscures their unsavouriness – and the great misery they will in their own turn cause.
That’s what creates resilience. Everyone doing their job, not offloading them – especially the impossible ones – on to others. That’s the way you create people with enough mental and physical resources to draw on in a crisis.
I mean, Maglite are easier. I get it. Telling people to buy candles for … for when the internet goes out? is cheap, even if it makes no sense at all. The other way is hard, and expensive. Who wants that? Oh – we do. We need it, from the only people who can do it. We do our jobs, while you shuffle shambolically, contemptibly through an approximation of yours. You owe us more than words can say.