Lessons From a Lamp Post: Why the numbers don't add up. Part 4 of 4
I am not a prepper, or a survivalist, or a doomsday bunker kind of guy but I am concerned about what I see happening in our country. I believe people are basically good, although not all of them and certainly not all the time. Like most citizens of our modern technological world I am wholly reliant upon a fragile web of services to meet my most basic needs. Now that Home Land Security has announced cyber war as the top most threat faced by America, have you considered what will happen if those services collapse? I am convinced that the answer is chaos. It’ll take a few days, but when people figure out that the power isn’t coming back on, and there is no water, and their store is out of food, and their car is out of gas, attitudes are going to change!
A simple example might be in relating to the recent natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita a few months later. Approximately 3.7 million people attempted to evacuate creating predictable results. The scene along the stalled evacuation route was like a segment from an apocalypse movie; crowds milling restlessly, gas stations and mini-marts picked clean and heaped with trash, and stranded families sleeping by the side of the road. After these hurricanes nobody had any illusions that help was on the way. So have you thought about what you will do if your power never comes back on, or your grocery store shelves are never restocked?
Regrettably, much of the gun violence after Katrina was racially-motivated demonstrating how bad and how quickly things can degrade into chaos. White vigilantes targeted Black people and four police men were convicted of shooting Blacks who were trying to walk to safety. Obviously guns in the hands of bad guys did not make the situation better, they made it worse. The New Orleans Police Superintendent’s suggestion to confiscate all firearms didn’t help either, even though it’s almost understandable given that he was under staffed because many of his officers had evacuated with the other victims.
I might be persuaded to accept the Superintendent’s plea that “no civilians be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms” if the police are willing and able to perform their duties. In any case this should never be extended to the right to protect one’s self in one’s home. Regardless, the Superintendent’s futile suggestion would not have worked anyway because the recalcitrant criminal will not be turning in his (or her) guns for the greater good.
Another example is the massive earthquake in Haiti a few years ago. An estimated 2.5 million people were displaced from their homes, and after big $$ the people are still living in temporary shelters. In fact I recently heard on NPR that it would have been more efficient if the United States had given every person $10,000.00 on which they could be living well, instead of wasting money on grand schemes that never reached the populace. Add to our threat of earthquakes, climate change, pandemic, meteor strike, terrorist attack, and now cyber war and it’s easy to see why I think we are woefully under prepared!
