In Time Of Disaster: Who's Interfering With Whom?

It should be exquisitely clear by now that PREPAREDNESS is absolutely essential not only for personal safety, restored commerce and uninterrupted continuity of the nation, but for the very survival of the nation.

Part of the Washington disease of Potomac Fever is the isolation officials develop in their over-centralization, which then cultivates their deafness and loss of touch with our realities. (That should be exquisitely clear, too!) This is a disease unique to public service. It spreads to almost every corner of government to the point of vexing taxpayers who believe we cannot effect change any longer.

How does that perspective work in time of disaster? The same way it works in time of border control, I’m afraid.

The threat of terrorism, especially lately on matters such as "America’s Hiroshima", brings to light how we want to be governed and still free at such a time. And from now on. This requires citizen involvement, which is discouraged a hundred different ways. Disaster management is one of them.

One of the most obvious and insulting giveaways to the way officials view constituents is in how they insist on taking charge of incidents where – in many cases – we might be effective instead of doing nothing while awaiting assets, where they are still several minutes away, if not longer.

One of the best examples is in the latest official position against the Minuteman Project. The report is that Homeland Security enunciates on the record its willingness to work together with the MMP, but then doesn’t follow through.

What are they thinking?

Until help arrives – and in time of disaster, it may be hours to days – it’s a matter of an ongoing, evolving emergency where managing the emergency is in proportion to how it is answered by that all-important response time and effective deployment of assets. I believe the opinion of some that, in time of a large disaster, the actual arrival of assets could be as much as 30 days or more. Thus, preparedness for a hermitage possibly on the order of four weeks would be well-advised.

But the preparedness itself is not the problem, is it? It’s a question of how much better prepared we can be if there is a cooperation between the officials and the governed.

But this will not be forthcoming.

Let’s look at some math a moment. For asset assignment of a per 100,000 persons catchment area in any district on any given day, a local fire station is busy enough, but an immense request for aid for all or most of those 100,000 constituents inundates the entire system (including non-fire agencies) and immediately exhausts assets way out of equilibrium, especially if the firehouse is among the casualties. Deployment of assets for anything from a chemical emergency to a bomb is well planned, yes, but can be exhausted in no time in trying to meet a six figure casualty.

What if civilians helped civilians?

One of the chief problems in introducing this kind of thinking isn’t a shortage of real preparedness, or of volunteers or even of materiel necessarily, but the resistance of authorities. For some reason, they think we’re stupid. Incapable. Gutless. Not worthy of input.

I dislike intensely the official positions which call for excluding constituent involvement as in the Minuteman Project – the very successful Minuteman Project, I might add.

This smirking rejection is done in planning, in overall philosophy in topics such as evacuation plans, in shelters, medical resources, planned inoculations, excessive dependence on officials in law enforcement, you get the idea. Freezing the individual out or any willing organization out and forcing them to take orders against their will and against the community interests is a slur. Agencies are there to support, not necessarily against the will of the governed, and definitely not against our authority. And that includes Homeland Security.

In the real-life excursion into Hell of 9-11, one big mistake officials made was telling the victims in the Towers to stay where they are. That had to be one of the dumbest, most memorable instructions of an entire career. Similar to this in many ways is for officials to insist on non-resistance in time of violent crime, a real problem that could materialize in time of disaster. (The truth is that — most of the time, not just some of the time — resistance reduces the likelihood of injury [See The Kleck Study]). Another is, of course, The Minutemen.

My surmise of these reports is that they exemplify the automatic use-my-agency / let-us-handle-it thinking. Some who didn’t subscribe to these are alive today. One of the best kept secrets is that sometimes we don’t need an agency (except for the fact that we hire public servants to do what we ourselves would be doing, which is their sole purpose.) We certainly don’t need some of them where they fail and/or where the need can be fulfilled by individuals who already have the authority to act (we all do), who know their territory, customs and assets, and who have an interest in the outcome. That’s important. That’s everything.

The bottom line of Potomac Fever is that officials do not live with our realities.

One of the smarter moves in EMS history was to train dispatchers to dictate first-aid over the phone to the person reporting. It appreciates one fact: someone is already on scene, namely the reporting party. But this object lesson seems to elude officials.

See one, do one, teach one.
We need to carry the momentum of deeper citizen involvement through to preparedness and wrap it up with a deeper civilian supervision of officials.

In teaching Medicine, including physician and non-physician professionals, clinical rounds often take advantage of individual cases to teach methods and procedures. You observe one for the first time, then the next time you encounter one it’s your turn to do it, then the next time you encounter one, it’s your turn to teach it, and so it goes.

[Off-topic note: I’ll never forget the String Test. My clinical rotation involved seeing an alcoholic in the treatment room. My physician-trainer withdrew an imaginary string from his pocket and asked the patient if he could see it; the patient said that he could; we walked out to discuss the behavior of confabulation in connection with chronic alcoholism when the patient called to us to say that we’d dropped our string on the floor.]

What makes officials think that civilians cannot be taught?

This is not even a technical problem: it is an authority problem, where officials seem to forget who grants them their authority to begin with. It seems that the concept of civilian involvement itself is felt as a challenge to their authority, the authority we grant them!

For anyone who’s read my previous pieces here, I’ve consistently advocated citizen involvement in everything from Citizen CPR to The Minutemen to the synergy between law enforcement and the individuals in that community. These are all good examples of citizen involvement. This isn’t to work at cross-purposes with agencies, but to work together. Freezing people out of the process is to work at cross-purposes.

I very much like a most welcome article written for The Christian Science Monitor by Alexandra Marks available here. Marks records keen observations in recent, real-life cases where this model is not only proven workable, but essential for our survival. I call it the stand-our-ground movement, and I want to see it get legs.

When the chips are down and the civilians need to mobilize but are not allowed, we have a problem. When we protest and get nowhere, we have a problem. Whether it’s intentional to control the populace or unintentional, as in a misguided belief that it would be unsafe, the result is the same: a valuable asset is not used. The real safety and optimal outcome is stifled, and for what?

In time of disaster management which involves official insistence on excluding the very people they’re sworn to serve, who’s interfering with whom?

My frequent mention of individuals as the first line of defense is not only nationwide concealed carry of weapons, but a much larger concept of local preparedness in time of disaster, in time of failure of the infrastructure with the optimal response time of response times: people already on scene. This could be broken highways, inundated police and EMS, local disease and overloaded medical resources – anything.

The most immediate benefit of a prepared – and involved – community is that of being already on scene. Are they a burden to government, or a resource unto themselves?

Including the community means accepting volunteers and training them. And it means being accepting, something new for officials, I know.

The officials need to understand that liberty enthusiasts and other constituents are the equally trustworthy or even more trustworthy element in the equation in protecting the nation, be it from crime, terrorist acts or in time of any local disaster, and they should make it policy in a special wing of DHS, because we are the authority.

The stand-our-ground movement should come alive in DHS in the form of nationwide concealed carry of weapons, definitive preparedness training and recognition of citizen volunteers who wish to participate in their community in time of emergency (including first-aid, exemptions from curfews, special liaisons, information disbursement, etc.) a better cooperation between local law enforcement, federal agencies and the citizens, and finally, a policy where locals are free to reject the instructions of the officials.

Martial law may be unacceptable, because, like a zero-tolerance policy, it profoundly affects the honest much more than it will ever reach the dishonest. An or-else curfew would be one such example of the zero-tolerance imposition. It constitutes more of an interference than an aid, and stomps on the community’s avenue to protest. When utilities are out and when people must remain in their homes or else, communication breaks down and tension builds. A few community faces would help to keep things quiet and safe.

What would happen during a curfew where someone violates the martial law and escapes the attention of the officers/troops and the homeowner is still on their own at the most critical moment? We have to live with our realities. It's time officials recognized and respected this.

The entire body of the Constitution is not about empowering government, but of limiting government. Officials may not grant themselves powers we did not grant them, and disasters are a serious venue where we don’t want officials to have too much control over persons and property.

We don’t want to be excluded from protecting our own homes and way of life, nor do we want to be viewed with suspicion for demanding it.

_____________________________________________

John Longenecker is author of The Battle We Fight - Battling Potomac Fever To Recapture Our Homes and Communities available at online booksellers. His website is www.NationwideConcealedCarry.com