I want to give you a memory test. How many of you remember these chilling words? “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the FCC and federal, state and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed to tune to one of the broadcast stations in your area.”

It’s been ten years since the Emergency Broadcast System broadcast its last alert. Recently it has been supplanted by the Emergency Alert System, but for many years the EBS stood ready to warn us in case the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. Today, such concerns seem to have gone the way of fallout shelters and tailfins on automobiles but people t…