The Illusion of Safety II

There is a banner ad I saw that says “Would You Feel Safe With McCain as President.” Then it has a yes and a no button and something about enter to win $50 grand. While this may be linked to some opinion poll it is most likely a way to get your personal info into a database and then sell it around the net. But. They asked the question so let’s answer it here.

No. And neither should you.

The American people have got to stop masturbating. Listening to politicians and feeling safe is no different than feeling love while watching porn. Either way you’re still responsible for your own security and companionship. Katie Morgan and Jenna Jameson aren’t your girlfriends and John McCain and Barack Obama aren’t your bodyguards.

Someone on the radio said recently that it was sad that people don’t feel safe anymore because of all the changes that have happened since 2001. I disagree. People who feel safe eventually become complacent, opening themselves up to danger. But let’s leave personal 1 on 1 threats (our biggest danger) aside and focus on terrorism from outside the country. Am I confident that John McCain, Barack Obama or any other president will send in the troops the instant it becomes necessary, to defend the country against the terrorists? No. Am I confident that the alphabet agencies will identify and neutralize terrorists so they are unable to attack again? No. You lost whatever trust I had in you. I’m not going to forgive the incompetence and I am not going to trust you to protect the country now. My response to protestations of assurance is “whatever.”

As far as personal security is concerned, as I’ve written before, I’m going to watch my own back and not give the responsibility for my protection to anyone.

Break-in Averted

We left work a little late and as we were walking out of the building someone who was bent over one of the cars turned abruptly and walked straight away from us out of the parking lot without looking back. It would appear that my boss and I prevented a car from being broken into. The vehicle didn’t appear to have an alarm and perhaps looked like easier pickings. Alarms are not any kind of guarantee. A lot of people who are broken into with alarms usually say, “I don’t know how it happened. I have an alarm.” They’re not realizing that part of the purpose of a vehicle alarm is to make breaking in inconvenient enough that the criminal moves on to something else. The last I saw the guy was headed towards the freeway. He may come skulking around later but that’s not something we can worry about. Maybe if he sees that people are watching he’ll think better about trying to violate the cars there.

More About Safety

This is what I mean about people wanting to feel safe vs. people taking responsibility for themselves.

This is an encounter someone had about twenty years ago with my Aunt Jessie. Aunt Jessie was my grandmother’s aunt. She lived to be about 96. She wasn’t a very tall lady. She was about 4′9″but wherever she was she commanded respect, as one should having logged that many years. When I knew her she lived in Houston. She died in the summer of 1989 and was still active up until a few months before her death.

A couple of years earlier she was out painting her house, which was no small feat for a nonagenarian. There were some kids in the alley, and from where she was they probably sounded like they were playing. That was until one climbed the fence and came at her with a stick. He swung the stick down to hit her and it broke across her shoulder. Now Aunt Jessie had dipped snuff out of steel-lid jars and chewed plug tobacco since before WWI. All those years had made her teeth just a little bit brown. She stood her ground, glared at this kid, and through clenched brownish teeth said, “You little son of a bitch!”

“…and child, his little ass flew!” was how she described it to my mom. She didn’t see anything after that but elbows and heels as that little bastard made his way back up over the fence into the alley.

She stood her ground against a coward…a coward who had nothing other than perhaps his stature backing him up. I don’t know whether or not she felt “safe.” I only know she was dealing with a bully and wasn’t having any of his sh*t. Whether he could have beat her up or not doesn’t matter. A person standing their ground with nothing but bare hands can strike fear into hearts. This isn’t about arming or not arming oneself with guns or knives or whatever. It’s about power. The only power this child had over my aunt was a perception of power he was expecting her to give him. She didn’t.

The Security Blanket: Another Illusion

There are people out there, who in one form or another try to find their security blanket. Their wish is to wrap themselves up tightly in it, kinda like a sausage kolache, and snuggle their way through whatever challenges life throws at them.

.:NEWSFLASH:.

That’s coziness, not safety. Warm and fuzzy is just that, warm and fuzzy. It’s pleasant. Sitting on the sofa, wrapped in 19lbs of sleeping bag and comforter, with a huge mug of one of the sleepier varieties of tea is great, especially on an overcast rainy day when you don’t have to go out of the house. That’s fine. Whatever your security blanket is, whether job security or family or retirement money, it’s something you may someday have to fight to keep. Keep all that in perspective and don’t confuse the two.

Guarantees of safety

Think about all the movies you’ve seen where some security person tells the person they’re assigned to protect that they “guarantee their safety.” This is either the person who ends up betraying them or gets killed and the person who was their charge is left to fend for himself. Just like safety itself, the guarantee of safety is an illusion. It is said to people to induce an emotional response…a sense of being taken care of.

If you want to have hired guns to protect you, go ahead. Just beware anyone who comes with assurances of the outcome. I can’t guarantee your safety. The best I can do is die trying to protect you. That is the only honorable promise anyone can make and the only thing you should expect when you’re placing your life in someone else’s hands. It’s what soldiers do for each other every day. Guaranteeing safety is a disingenuous and dangerous statement made in arrogance. Think about it. Even G-d doesn’t guarantee anyone’s safety. There are passages in the Bible where G-d protects people from danger (Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego) and times when he doesn’t (too many references).

Whoever guarantees your safety doesn’t mean it. Whoever risks their life to protect you does.

The illusion of safety

A person sitting on a pallet of gold in the Fort Knox vault is safe but the rent is more than most people can afford.

• You’re either aware or you’re not aware.
• You’re either prepared or you’re not prepared.
• You’re either responsible or you’re not responsible.
• You’re either trained or you’re not trained.

These are the things one must be doing every day, in every situation, to best ensure freedom from harm. “Safe” and “Secure” are overused and overly misunderstood. Safety, as it is pitched about in the media and the community conversations is an illusion. It’s an abstraction. It does not exist.

We want to be free to move about public venues playing with our personal electronics and not be physically threatened. We think that the existence of the police or other security guarantees that. And so people go about their yakking, head bopping, snapshooting, texting, getting cash from the ATM, eating lives not paying attention very far beyond their “personal space.” Then when someone grabs their toys and runs they stand around wondering what just happened. Or something worse befalls them which I won’t go into. These more serious events are well depicted on CSI and Law and Order.

Back in 2000 I was in one of the malls here. I left the store I had been shopping at and went to the ATM which was about 50 yards away in an open area back down the wing. I got my twenty bucks and receipt and stuck them in my shirt pocket and started back towards the store. I didn’t really pay attention to who was around. I wasn’t thinking about that or even that it was necessary. My mind was on the fact that I needed the cash and had to get done so I could start heading to work. When I got about 2/3 of the way back I got this twitchy feeling like someone was watching me. Then in my right eyeglass lens I sort of caught a reflection of someone getting close to me. It was then that I thought, wait a minute. something’s wrong here. I stopped and turned around. There was a man about four feet away from me. I tried to look him in the eye. We had just passed the last down escalator for that wing. He turned and went and got on it. He looked down at his feet. I kept trying to look at him…to look him in the eye until he was out of sight.

Did I feel “safe?” I don’t know. I doubt it. I did not feel afraid. Would I have won had there been a physical confrontation? I don’t know. It’s possible. But maybe not. I know from what happened that the guy who was intending on shoving me and stealing my money or whatever he was going to do did not have the stomach for facing me full on. He’s a crook, a thief. His operating method was surprise and maybe speed. I was supposed to be left $20 poorer and wondering what happened. So my “safety” began the moment I stopped and took responsibility for myself and my surroundings and it only lasted as long as I was doing that.

Where was mall security? Where were the police? I don’t know and I really don’t care. It doesn’t do me any good having them there if my attacker is running to the exit with my money and they’ve maybe just heard through the grapevine that something just happened on the second level between Space City and Gadzooks. It doesn’t do anyone any good if they’re lying on the jogging trail with a stab wound, the mugger is running away with their iPod and the bicycle park police are on the other side of the lake. It’s called crime. The US military does not swear an oath to protect you from it. The police do, but they’re not your bodyguards or personal escorts. There is no static condition of safety or security that guarantees your freedom from it. The government doctor can implant an RFID chip next to your colon and an array of billion dollar satellites will know exactly where your body is when you just bled to death from a gunshot. While this will be an aid to the authorities in getting your remains to the coroner, none of this stuff matters if you could have dealt with a situation and didn’t because you weren’t paying attention.

Here are my “security measures”:

1. Trust no one. If you don’t know them personally they don’t have your back.
2. Compartmentalize your head. Stay sufficiently disconnected from your toys to be aware of your surroundings.
3. Don’t count money or have cash visible while walking around. Avoid open air ATMs.
4. Keep your bag between you and a wall.
5. If you’re at a restaurant take your stuff with you to the toilet.
6. Lock the car at night and stay with it until that stupid interior light goes out.
7. Look all around yourself all the time.
8. Know where the exit is.
9. Remember where you parked.
10. Watch the watchers. There is always someone who is out of place. Make sure you see them.
11. There are exceptions and variations to these. Try to keep that to a minimum.

Protecting yourself is your responsibility. It’s more important than feeling safe.

Elevator motion sensor at work

One of the elevators at work is set a little too sensitive. We were standing 18″ inside the door and one of us moved an arm and the doors, that were closing, jerked back open. One passenger should not have to go all the way to the back of the elevator for it to operate properly. If anything they need to set the sensors more sensitive from 2.5′ to the floor. This is to make sure it opens when someone’s toddler lets go of their hand and makes a break for it.

Disaster Preparedness: Surviving an evacuation

I just watched the Sci-Fi channel miniseries Asteroid. Any disaster movie raises a couple questions I am not sure many stop to answer for themselves. How fast can you get ready and be gone if city officials announced an evacuation? There’s stuff you need to take and stuff you need to leave and you are going to have to know the difference. To give you some idea what I am talking about, they say when the Titanic sank there was a woman who went back to her cabin to retrieve two oranges. Things can be replaced. Life cannot. It would probably do everyone good to come up with a plan and place things where they can be gotten to in a timely manner. I keep a bag in my truck but that only has enough clothing for a couple of days. I need to keep a fully stocked kit here at home. I’ll start putting that together in the coming months.

The other question is, what is your route out of town going to be? That depends on where the threat is coming from. When Katrina and Rita hit people started heading this direction NE from the Gulf. And hurricanes that run aground in Texas come in from the Gulf of Mexico with roughly the direction of San Angelo. Fortunately the eye never gets there. But if the Governor announced an evac. while we’d have the means to evacuate, we’d have a hard time getting out. Then there’s the problem of fuel availability and traffic situations but those are things we’d have to deal with anyway.

Here are some links to disaster preparedness-related websites:
Ready dot gov
City of San Francisco’s 72hours dot org
Disaster preparedness and response
American Red Cross’ Prepare dot org
Equipped to Survive^TM Disaster Preparedness
National Center for Disaster Preparedness
A bunch of links from Knowledgehound

Safety Training

It has been my experience that you’ve got about 15 minutes, maybe less, of productive time in any meeting before eyes start to glaze and the pace of mind wandering increases. The problem is that employees need a deeper and broader understanding of material related to most safety issues. Web-based training can be a useful tool for bringing smaller groups of employees up to speed on information they need. safety training is more than just a series of “don’t dos” that you present a group of employees with and expect them to follow when the situation arises. Employees take to the training more when they can do more than simply sit and absorb. Let’s say you are installing a new oxygen-depleting fire control system. You’ll need to train your employees on both the operation of that system as well as SCBA equipment. Rather than take entire groups off-site for training and going through the expense of paying overtime for coverage, environmental health and safety software would allow you to have smaller groups train on the material and then bring in an outside trainer when the system goes live. PureSafety offers training software to meet the needs of your organization. From their website at puresafety dot com, you can request a demo on topics such as asbestos management, spill prevention, environmental awareness, etc. Their training courses are available in six languages and are eligible for IACET-Approved CEUs. They provide both safety training and incident/injury management training. Have a look at their website and see if they can help meet your training needs.