DISASTER
MANAGEMENT: BE PREPARED AND ARMED
PART 3
By
John Longenecker
October 9, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Survival is an attitude. It must be a superior attitude. It is the stance adjustment that situations external have changed so substantially that your life is threatened, and the very first thing to change is your threat assessment abilities.
Survival is the serious-minded approach to the natural and man-made forces now against you and to keep that attitude for the duration. It’s a good skill to acquire and to keep.
If you are facing a hurricane, you are about to endure a force which is against you. Inclement weather doesn’t care about life, property values, the shape of the earth, the condition of the soil, the monetary system, electrical grid or food supply. It is what it is. As a force of nature, it is indifferent. One can often survive the weather, but what about other things the disaster brings?
In time of crisis, there are other foes Americans will face, and your threat assessment has to be right on. It is a condition of repeated assaults where the enemy can repeatedly afford to be wrong and you cannot afford to be wrong even once. In Parts I and II, we talked about scavengers, the predators who had normally been restrained by society, but who came out of the shadows and opportunistically strike using the disaster itself as cover. Some of these people believe the conditions are even a sort of permission, as in the case of riotings and sweeping crimes. They believe the system will be sufficiently choked to make detection as hard as apprehension, so they are emboldened. Oftentimes, they are right. They escape both discovery and arrest.
This segment describes yet another foe, another opportunist, this one political. This foe, too, is indifferent to man. This one, too, is using the crisis as cover for seizing opportunities. This one, too, believes it has ‘permission’ to act. It sometimes refers to that as a Mandate.
Put another way, our definition of survival is where you come out alive and well on the other side of the disaster and your sovereignty and freedoms come out alive and well with you.
The Bureaucracies as Opportunistic
We know that bureaucrats never let a good crisis go to waste. I try not to let chocolate go to waist. We also are coming to learn more and more about the gleeful attitude of bureaucrats who lick their chops at every prospect of intervention. It is becoming so commonplace now that it is blatant. Whether hostile to the people or innocently mistaken, the outcome is the same. The citizen is frozen out of the disaster planning, disaster management and disaster recovery.
In poring over several treatises on international disaster management, the emphasis is on EMS and other concepts. First-aid, mobilized definitive medical care and transport into the system are all vital, no question about it. But, must it be conducted to the exclusion of the citizen volunteers who were there first? This is all too common, and it becomes an ingredient in a recipe for statism.
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Discussions and forums are all about how bureaucracies strive to educate the public instead of taking a lesson from the public. This is the group-think of the public servant. In reading these, I see that it is another situation of bureaucrats consulting other bureaucrats, a practice I have named on the habit of college trustees consulting police regarding guns on campus. It’s easy to locate another cloistered viewpoint to fortify your own, but this excludes the input from the very people the trustees (and police) were sworn to serve. One cannot serve the public if one ignores the public in all except who pays for it all.
Even today, bureaucrats broadly remain puzzled as to why civilians criticize them so. Public servants remain puzzled as to why they cannot get through to taxpayers. Officials remain puzzled as to why civilians battle them, and they remain puzzled as to why they do not furnish suggestions.
In truth, civilians do furnish suggestions, but the mind-set of the bureaucrat cannot comprehend them. Why not? Because the mind-set of the official sees themselves as part of the neutral, conventional picture instead of part of the problem: excluding the people as an asset (volunteers) and viewing the people only as an opportunity (looting the nation in transfers of wealth). They see themselves as smarter, more central to information, more assets, more fire-in-the-belly anxious to help, and simply filter out the truth that they are not as needed as they believe they are. Cooperation would ensue if they stopped talking and started listening.
This ‘competition’ with the electorate as it has been proposed is getting to be widespread as a practice. It is an insistence that the State run things and simply filter out how civilians have run things rather well with smaller government long before the fire-in-the-belly. Called ‘tinkering’ by some very kindly observers, it is more of a blueprinted social engineering for gain, a rather unwelcome movement over the decades.
Disasters furnish an opening in dissuading the electorate from such self-reliance knowledge and true preparedness in their personal independence values. Independence is discouraged by a sort of illicit use of force for political change, including white papers and bulletins characterizing preparedness groups as anti-government. Citizen resentment of official heavy-handedness baffles officials, and it is met with indignant servant anger, even retaliation. Individuals who know they don’t have to put up with offensive insistence from their servants are branded.
When citizens are armed in time of disaster, the intention is not to battle troops who may illegally come for the guns (that has been made even more illegal since the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006, an act of Congress): it is much more to get a handle on immediate, local criminal violence such that crime cannot be used as a ‘crisis’ with which to impose further and further costly bureaucracies.
This is how we lose our sovereignty in time of disaster as well as by other avenues. Allow a crisis within a crisis and some citizens can be convinced that we need more gun control, or that shortages are somehow unavoidable, or that we need more police or crackdowns.
Stopping crime and making it a non-issue in time of disaster is how we impeach the gun control propositions as utterly unneeded. Having the freedom of movement to prepare with plenty of supplies will also go a long way in protecting your sovereignty. The more independent of servants you are, the more your sovereignty is respected by the servants. And less independent of the electorate are the servants of the people.
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The worst fate for an official is to be unneeded. Redundant. Irrelevant is a word I hear. The best thing for an official is to have shared values with constituents. Only then is an official really needed at all.
One of the best disaster preparedness models, then, is to elect the better candidates for all offices in 2012. Think shared values. Think integrity. Think tests of sovereignty knowledge and official support for the sovereignty of the people as supreme authority.
The best plan for our sovereignty to survive along with us on the other side of a disaster is to have the right people in office long before disaster strikes. Some of us believe we can even avert some kinds of disasters with the right people in office.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3,
Safer Streets 2011: Disaster management: The better preparedness model will be armed
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