The 72-hour backpack and the new version of “I want to get home alone and drunk”

A few years ago, the Spanish far left, with its characteristic vulgarity, popularized a slogan among many women.

Defending Europe against the Russian threat is a matter of lives, not ideologies
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“I want to get home alone and drunk”

That slogan stated: "I want to get home alone and drunk." The far-left party Podemos used that slogan to defend that women should not take any precautions and that we should achieve a society in which sexual freedom is fully guaranteed. On March 3, 2020, the Ministry of Equality, in the hands of the communist Irene Montero, justified that slogan thus:

We want the feminist cry "Alone and drunk, I want to get home" to become a reality so we can stop living in fear. Women's rights will never again be lost in dark alleys.

Paradoxically, the law that Podemos promoted with that slogan served to reduce the sentences of more than 1,000 rapists and put many of them on the streets, generating more fear among many Spanish women than they felt before the law was passed. Significantly, rapes have skyrocketed in Spain since 2020.

Europe is taking its defense seriously, just as Trump wanted

A few months ago, some were pleased with Trump's arrival as president of the United States for various reasons. One of those reasons, we were told, is that Europe would have to worry about its own security, because the US can't afford to spend taxpayer money defending Europeans.

Finally, it seems that the European Union is taking this problem seriously, but not because the US has withdrawn its forces from Europe, but because Trump is showing an alarming harmony with Putin's dictatorship, in addition to threatening the sovereignty of a European country: Denmark. Obviously, a European rearmament plan does not only involve buying weapons, which is very important, but requires something much more basic: we have to assume the need to defend ourselves in the event that Europe suffers new aggression from Russia or any other country.

Civil Defense and the 72-Hour Backpack

One way to address this need is to prepare for the worst. It's unlikely that Russia will invade Europe anytime soon, but we have two options: make the mistake of believing that nothing will happen and then it does, or make the mistake of believing that something bad will happen. The second possibility would have much less serious consequences than the first. Of course, preparing for the worst means adopting civil defense guidelines that are already common in countries like Finland, whose proximity to Russia has taught its citizens to prepare for emergencies without waiting for others to come to their rescue.

One of the tips circulating these days is to prepare a 72-hour backpack with basic items to face an emergency situation, whether related to defense or any type of disaster: fires, floods, industrial accidents, etc. Many Spaniards have taken this as a joke (in Spain we don't even take things that could cost us our lives seriously) and others have gotten angry saying that they want to scare us.

I confess my astonishment at these reactions. Six months ago, floods devastated several towns in Spain, and for days, residents of those towns went out onto their balconies to ask for help from the few journalists who entered ground zero. Last year, a building caught fire in Valencia, killing 10 people, due to the speed with which the flames spread. In several regions, forest fires have been a problem for years, and we could go on and on.

Like millions of other Europeans, we Spaniards are entrenched in a mentality that believes the State must protect us from any risk, but total security does not exist. There are many situations in which the State will not be able to assist the victims of any catastrophe as quickly as some would like. One such situation is a military attack, a possibility that today seems remote for those of us who live far from Russia, but not so much for Europeans who live near its borders.

The effects of living in a more insecure world

We probably wouldn't be talking about any of this if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine and if Trump hadn't shown himself willing to reward Moscow for carrying out that invasion by handing over part of the invaded country. This would incentivize Russia to launch new attacks, which could target the citizens of some allied countries that have already been threatened by Russia, such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

Just as happened to Podemos voters when Irene Montero announced that law allowing women to return home alone and drunk, many thought they saw in Trump an ingenious peacemaker, but in reality he is leaving us with a more insecure world, in which international law no longer has any value (not only in Ukraine, but also in Greenland), an environment in which European countries are forced to arm themselves if they want to guarantee their security. And that process involves assuming the role of citizens in this new environment.

The curious thing is that many who yesterday applauded Trump and celebrated that Europe had to take care of its own defense (they said it in a "Europe, now it's your turn to screw up" kind of way, despite being European, as if it had nothing to do with them), now grumble because it's their turn to suffer the effects of the US president's decisions.

Until now, they haven't cared that the Ukrainians found themselves in a humiliating situation, with two great powers negotiating a ceasefire behind their backs that would leave them defenseless against the Russian dictatorship, a pause that the latter could use to rearm and then finish what it started in 2022. They called it "peace," saying that "any peace" was better than war, but now they get uncomfortable when that false peace arrives at their doorstep, even though no one has declared war on us. Perhaps it's time to consider that if you wish on others what would be unacceptable to you (seeing your country torn apart, oppressed and defenseless against a criminal tyrant, and having to live every day in fear of an attack), your wishes will surely soon turn against you.

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Image: Poster for the film "The Last of Us."