The familiar old judgmental feeling welled up in my heart when I saw news report after news report of Ukrainians forming longs lines to take money out of the bank and looking for food and water to buy the day that Russia invaded. Didn’t they know this was coming? Why were they in a panic to get a stockpile of food and water now?

In a chartable mood, I can sympathize with not trusting America’s intelligence agencies and thinking that Putin was not crazy enough to do what he has done. Maybe I would have been in the same camp if it had not been for some people smarter than me walking me through the available open source information and what it meant from a military perspective. And how many people in Ukraine have the time and inclination to collect the sources of information that I read?

Regardless of whether you are charitable or not, the fact remains that a lot of Ukrainians completely failed to see this coming.

If disaster strikes your country, are you going to be one of those people in a panic trying to buy food in a rapidly emptying grocery store? Or do you think you are smarter then all those Ukrainians who totally failed to see this coming and you will be smart enough to stock up before the general panic sets in?

Of course, there is a third alternative. You could just assume that you don’t know what is going to happen in this crazy world and try to set aside some kind of kit to prepare for the kinds of emergencies that strike this world from time to time. On that note, I read with interests that the Israelis are sending a hundred tons of humanitarian aid composed of…..

“water purification kits, medical equipment as well as drugs, tents, blankets, sleeping bags and additional equipment for civilians who are not in their homes in the cold winter weather”

It sounds very similar to the equipment list I laid out as part of my Yuppie FEMA plan. If you had the all the gear as laid out in that plan, you would be pretty well set up to throw it all in the car and flee. If I felt compelled to do that, the main additional things I would wish I had were a tent, a few full gas cans to extend the range of my vehicle, and a way to charge my cell phones without running my vehicle.

Hopefully, we will never experience a crisis on the scale of what Ukraine is going through now. But you should always remember all the people in Ukraine who held on to that hope without doing anything all the way up to the point when it became a certainty. Maybe that memory will keep you from being just like them.