Are you prepared to be safe and content? If so you may be seriously out of sync with your country and the people around you. From my curious perch on my upstate, N.Y. farm, where I have no well-informed sources, read no polls and studies, know no important people,  can see nothing but cows, donkeys, sheep and dogs, it seems as if the reigning ideology in America is not left-or-right, but Emergency Preparedness. I think we are becoming an Emergency Preparedness people, rushing to prepare for the growing list of disasters we are told daily are about to befall us: a collapsing world economy, environmental catastrophe, drought, global warming, lawsuits and legal liability, floods and storms, farm shortages and resulting violence and mayhem, the rapid decline of affordable energy, nuclear catastrophe, the decline of animal species, corporate deprivations upon work and food,  terrorism, lawsuits, identity theft, outsourcing, the rise of China, and don’t forget tainted lettuce and fatty meats, two of the latest warnings from your government.

A friend of mine in Rochester is opening up his cold storage room in his basement and stuffing it with canned foods, guns and non-perishable foods. Okay, you are ready for Armaggedon, I asked him. But are you prepared to be content? Will you be ready if we survive more or less intact and choose to waste less, make less, spend less? He laughed. He thought I was joking.

I asked him what he would do when his neighbors came up the hill and knocked down his cold storage door and took all of  his canned tomatoes out? He said he hadn’t gotten that far. Emergency Preparedness is in. It has surpassed NFL Sunday games as the talk of our world.

What if women take over the world in a series of non-violent coups, stop wars and economic deprivations, shutter the big banks, help family farms rise again, close the box stories, offer land rushes in the interior again,  and there is a resultant spiritual awakening? What if family farms and backyard gardens return and supermarkets and Wal-Marts and other plagues on the earth sink into the landfill on which most are built? Are you ready for survival as well as catastrophe? For happiness as well as doom?  For the strange notion that the world may be a better place in 50 years, just as it is better now than it was 50 years ago? This kind of thinking is very unfashionable, naive at best, myopic, ostrich-in-the-sand stuff. You will not see this story discussed on cable news, and I know of no workshop to prepare anyone for the possibility that life could be good. There is absolutely no money in it.

My good friend Jenna Woginrich,  a wonderful writer and homesteader who owns and runs the fabled Cold Antler Farm over the hill from my farmhouse, even has a name for Emergency Preparedness, she calls is “prepping.” She is into prepping, it is a part of her life and work and she is planning a neat workshop in the Spring to help people prepare for emergencies. Jenna, who knows how to be cheerful and gloomy almost at the same time, is not into the dark side of prepping – the isolationists and survivalists. She just thinks it’s time to need less and take responsibility for our food.  When we are finally overwhelmed by our greed and shallowness, and the corporations and the banks have eaten the last holiday, investor, good job and family farm, and turn on each other Jenna will be up there with her horse Merlin. I will head for her place, she is a generous soul and I think she will give me one of her fat rabbits.

Jenna and I love each other, but we do not see the world in the same way sometimes. And we shouldn’t. She is 30 and I am 65. The world looks different on either end of the spectrum, and there are lots of different ways to look at the world.

But what about Emergency Contentment Workshop? We could call it “ecworking.” It’s a real opportunity. Nobody’s doing it.

I wonder how we would prepare for such a strange turn in thinking? How does one get ready for contentment. anyway? I wonder what an Emergency Contentment Workshop might discuss:

Meditation? Avoiding the news? Turning off Storm Center? Banning warnings and alarms on your Facebook Page? Boycotting Emergency Preparedness Discussions? Walking dogs? Avoiding sugar?  Buying a farm? Returning to nature? Staying away from doctors? Painting pictures? Hunting in the woods with your Dad? Writing stories and books? Taking great photos? Ignoring most of the pundits, institutions, politicians and leaders in the world?

The conventional wisdom of our time says we need to be prepared more each and every day for our impending ruination. Storm Center sells severe weather text warnings for only $3 a week. You can be the first person in your family to know disaster is coming and you can hear about it 100 times a day for weeks and if you go to the website, there are hundreds of tips for surviving weather emergencies. I have never done well with conventional wisdom, so I’m heading in a different direction.

I am preparing for peace. For safety. For a world in which we all help heal  Mother Earth, give up the pursuit of money and greed as a reason for existing, and live lives of greater meaning and contentment.  I am pretty bored with Emergency Preparedness, it is not really where I wish to go with my life. Perhaps, I told Maria, it is because I am getting older, and I am somewhat doomed anyhow, and the truth is, I would rather jump into the Battenkill River with a concrete piling attached to my leg than learn much more about how to be even better prepared for emergencies and disasters.