As a nation, we’re going broke—in multiple senses. But what I call the Scarlett O’Hara Defense (“I’ll think about it tomorrow”) and psychologists call “normalcy bias” allows us to go about our semi-normal lives even when the country has no leader, is involved in two proxy wars, is staggering under a ballooning national debt that exceeds our gross domestic product, and is placidly enduring a hostile invasion.

Now, personally, if I was going broke, I’d take on extra work, forage for edibles, and ride my bike. Nothing would be normal again until I got the ship righted. So, if we would stop stone-cold to deal with personal insolvency, what makes the failure of a nation less electrifying? You’d think it would be more. (The simple answer is that, individually, we don’t have the ability to print Monopoly money. Someone atop the colossus of government does.)

The normalcy bias will continue until we’re all unpleasantly shaken out of our lanes. We know abstractly that we can’t go on like this, though we’re happy to try for as long as we can. But a grand mal seizure is coming.

Economics alone says we can’t continue on this path. The consequence of profligate printing of currency is the devaluation of it, until it approaches worthlessness. If crowds got testy when toilet paper ran low, what will they do when more critical things disappear or become prohibitively expensive?

Furthermore, we are currently losing the information war. We’ve endured a perceived pandemic driven by a non-diagnostic test, widespread injection of a gene potion with no long-term testing, and government collusion with media to guarantee that no competing medical information made it out to the general public. Now we’re watching the stonewalling of information about the assassination attempt on a former president. When information is choked by the big players, it is the death rattle of a society.

Just now, there is a contender for highest office who has no more fitness for it than any marketeer of human body parts. With all the critical issues that need to be addressed, her main goal is more abortions. In serious forums, she laughs incongruously as though she has no capacity for sober thought, which perpetuates the fantasy that our country is not in grave peril.

Her running mate is a big belly-laugher, too. Putting either one of them in the same room with someone as intelligent as Vladimir Putin, or practically any other world leader, is like sending in Elmer Fudd to save the team. Without the comic relief.

And it appears that a not-insignificant slice of this country will vote the Fudd ticket. That’s the scariest part—that so many feckless people are driven by stage makeup and role-play games and untethered sex.

We are headed for a 9.0 on the Richter scale.

Early on Monday, August 5, it looked like the Big One had struck. The Nikkei index in Tokyo suffered the biggest drop in its history; other world indices plunged; Treasury yields fell dramatically; and Bitcoin, always volatile, lost nearly 20 percent. I involuntarily woke up every few hours during the night to check the overseas slide; it did not promote peaceful sleep, to say the least.

It appeared the overnight news might crash the American markets when they opened Monday morning. Thank God, it didn’t. Indices were down, but not catastrophically; and they appear to have recovered over the following week, possibly because of the Democrat sentiment that “we can’t win if people think we’re headed into a recession.”

Whatever props are being used to mask our precarious economic fix, we’ve gotten a temporary reprieve and we shouldn’t waste it. The foreshock on August 5 was a warning. Anyone who is able might use the weeks ahead to take some basic precautionary steps.

The pending disaster isn’t just that the stock market might flush our 401(k)s down the river to the sea; the disaster would be that a critical mass of people recognizes that we’re in big trouble all at the same time. In other words, panic. Remember the empty shelves in 2020? Our economy runs on just-in-time inventory, with manufacture and supply staggered. When everyone goes for the same thing at the same time, you get Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed giving away their honeymoon fund.

“Preppers” have been ridiculed ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Disaster was averted in a frightful game of chicken, and all those bomb shelters became entertaining artifacts. Then there was Y2K, which failed to materialize after a year of massive coding corrections. I personally ate a good many MRE’s in the spring of 2000, and my dad hosted an Eat Crow dinner (it was actually chicken) for friends he’d advised to prepare for the outage.

The fact that we’ve deflected some major incoming disasters, and eventually laughed at the worst-case scenarios, does not mean that disasters will never occur. Ask Floridians after Hurricane Ian, or Hawaiians who still haven’t rebuilt a year after the Maui fire.

Prepping in the face of multiple credible threats is just common sense. Without living in fear, we should have some degree of preparation, especially if we have people depending on us. Basic prep is water, food, shelter, and prayer. If anyone in your household is dependent on medication for survival, that becomes basic prep, too. Further steps might include sanitation, communications, and self-defense; but start with the basics.

The American Red Cross and Ready.gov are secular agencies which advise all families to make basic preparations. It has nothing to do with prophecies or private revelation. These organizations have seen a lot of disasters. Every household that’s prepared to be self-sufficient lightens the load on the system, which could capsize in a widespread emergency.

Be Red Cross ready and Department of Homeland Security ready.

My own basic one-month kit is here. It was designed to be completed in one trip to a superstore, with a few items ordered online (although I have now seen LifeStraws sold in a 3-pack at Costco, so I surmise that prepping has gone mainstream).

Once you have basic three-day to thirty-day preparation done, you may want to go deeper if there is time. Here are some sources to check out: Corps of Renewal and Charity; Be Ready Coalition; and Daniel O’Connor.

For every Catholic, preparation is done with prudence, discernment, and prayer. Innumerable sources have long beseeched us to pray the Rosary every day as Our Lady has been given charge of crushing Satan’s head. Daily Rosary is basic prep, no matter what else we’re doing.

We pray and we prepare because we know that whatever evil is done by the enemy, the gates of Hell will not prevail. We look forward, not back. Though we may walk through the paroxysms of a dying darkness, every step of preparation will be a brick in the rebuilding of Christendom.