And nowadays, living in Colorado, I'm way out of practice. And I'm far away from my "family" who I would need to reunite with. If I had a family, what would we do if we had to evacuate the school? Where would we go to make sure everyone was OK?
We had an emergency evacuation drill at work recently. I'm on the safety committee. We got everyone outside in a reasonable amount of time but it was amazing to watch how it worked. The building recently changed our exit doors because they added a new office to ours. Many of the people in my area demanded that we go out the old door even though a "better" door was available. So they waited in queue to go down a set of stairs into the new office area and all the new doorways instead of leaving through the new unobstructed doors. Odd. Think people!
Once outside they wanted to go to their cars and start them, which is technically a violation of our rules because of potential terrorist issues (potential bombs in the parking lot) but do they care? No. Not until something happens and they get hurt. Then they'll complain that they were "victimized" and look for someone to sue. I don't get this mentality. It used to be that Westerners were responsible for their own actions. What happened?
Anyway, let me show you a message I received in my email this morning:
Juval Aviv was the Israeli Agent upon whom the movie ' Munich ' was based. He was Golda Meir's bodyguard, and she appointed him to track down and bring to justice the Palestinian terrorists who took the Israeli athletes hostage and killed them during the Munich Olympic Games.
[snip]
Forget hijacking airplanes, because he says terrorists will NEVER try and hijack a plane again as they know the people onboard will never go down quietly again. Aviv believes our airport security is a joke -- that we have been reactionary rather than proactive in developing strategies that are truly effective.
For example:
1) Our airport technology is outdated. We look for metal, and the new explosives are made of plastic.
2) He talked about how some idiot tried to light his shoe on fire. Because of that, now everyone has to take off their shoes. A group of idiots tried to bring aboard liquid explosives. Now we can't bring liquids on board. He says he's waiting for some suicidal maniac to pour liquid explosive on his underwear; at which point, security will have us all traveling naked!
Every strategy we have is reactionary.
3) We only focus on security when people are heading to the gates.
Aviv says that if a terrorist attack targets airports in the future, they will target busy times on the front end of the airport when/where people are checking in. It would be easy for someone to take two suitcases of explosives, walk up to a busy check-in line, ask a person next to them to watch their bags for a minute while they run to the restroom or get a drink, and then detonate the bags BEFORE security even gets involved. In Israel , security checks bags BEFORE people can even ENTER the airport.
Aviv says the next terrorist attack here in America is imminent and will involve suicide bombers and non-suicide bombers in places where large groups of people congregate.
[snip]
Aviv says the terrorists who want to destroy America will not use sophisticated weapons. They like to use suicide as a front-line approach. It's cheap, it's easy, it's effective; and they have an infinite abundance of young militants more than willing to 'meet their destiny'.
He also says the next level of terrorists, over which America should be most concerned, will not be coming from abroad. But will be, instead, 'homegrown', having attended and been educated in our own schools and universities right here in the U.S. He says to look for 'students' who frequently travel back and forth to the Middle East . These young terrorists will be most dangerous because they will know our language and will fully understand the habits of Americans; but that we Americans won't know/understand a thing about them.
Aviv says that, as a people, Americans are unaware and uneducated about the terrorist threats we will inevitably face. America still has only a handful of Arabic and Farsi speaking people in our intelligence networks, and Aviv says it is critical that we change that fact SOON.
[snip]
Aviv also was concerned about the high number of children here in America who were in preschool and kindergarten after 9/11, who were 'lost' without parents being able to pick them up, and about our schools that had no plan in place to best care for the students until parents could get there. (In New York City , this was days, in some cases!)
He stresses the importance of having a plan, that's agreed upon within your family, of how to respond in the event of a terrorist emergency. He urges parents to contact their children's schools and demand that the schools too, develop plans of actions, just as they do in Israel .
Does your family know what to do if you can't contact one another by phone? Where would you gather in an emergency? He says we should all have a plan that is easy enough for even our youngest children to remember and follow.
[snip]
How will you communicate with your loved ones in the event you cannot speak to each other? You need to have a plan.
OK, that was long but... My personal opinion is that we, as Americans, get very caught up in our "trivial pursuits" like American Idol and Survivor and forget to ever look at larger things. Part of this is a testament to how safe it is here in the States that we don't have to worry about the things listed above. But, listening to talk radio for the last couple years has hurt my brain.
It looks like all the Talkers are doing is spouting their "world agenda" without ever looking at what it means. We label things as either Good Ideas (ours) or Terrible Ideas (anyone else's) which means we can never seriously talk about either idea and look for a way to successfully accomplish whatever we want to do. We're now using the same logic we used when talking about the former Soviet Russia (always evil, always dangerous,...) to talk about our neighbors. There's no way to make a system work if you declare that anything that is "not us" is evil and therefore to be ignored/destroyed. Our country was *founded* on the concept of bringing different groups of people together.
Maybe we need a radio talk show that talks about how to combine ideas or refute "dumb" ideas without resorting to name calling. Seriously. The only thing the "haters" can say about the new iPad is that it has a "stupid name"? Really? I don't think that's much of a leap from saying everything our President is doing is "Socialist" or that the "Feminazis" are attempting to do *blah*. What happened to reason? What happened to considered opinion? What happened to actually trying to solve things instead of just making snide comments?
It times like this that I wonder if Terrorists are our biggest problem...
Title Reference: Wizard of Oz - Soundtrack (2009 Remastered Edition)
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