Some of us do live in places where none of the above is more than a remote possiblity. We don’t have major earthquakes; the odds of there being a tornado almost non-existant (I think there was one minor one in the state during the last century); there have been no major floods or major hurricanes since well before I was born and it helps that I live inland and on a great big hill;we don’t have public water so there are no mains to break and powerlines usually stay put except for people hitting them… although we do have your last thing, unemployment, quite often I’ll grant you, but nothing I could put in an emergency kit would make a difference to that so I don’t quite get why it was included unless it’s a joke about writing survial guides.
The only frequent “events” we have here are snow storms and blizzards, which seldom hit without warning. You listen to the weather reports, buy an extra loaf of bread, an extra gallon of milk, and a few gallons of water, and make sure you bring in wood for the fireplace and know where the candles, lanterns and matches and snow shovels are. Maybe you pull out some board games and extra sweaters and bedding. They’re more of a fact of life than an emergency, so there’s not a lot of kit-making happening then either, since these things are usually within reach all winter.
As for terrorism attacks, what are they going to hit around here? Boston and NYC are far away, so biological weapons probably won’t be a problem, and if they do turn out to be, hey I won’t have to pay back my student loans after all. Unless they decide to hit Seabrook with a nuke (which would be a sort of irony) there’s not a lot of reason to get all worked up about it.
My friends mocked me for making an emergency kit for 1/1/00, but I’ve used it during a few power failures since then, and have been glad to have it in case of earthquake. My thinking right now is less about direct terrorism and more about having the wherewithall to hunker down for a week if anything gets nuts. At the same time, I find that I’m more protective of my partner than I am of myself, so I’ve made a 3-day kit for her car. Other than that, augmenting our camping gear with more water and toilet paper about covers a grab-and-go emergency (though grabbing the cats may or may not be easy).