William, do you mind if I cross-post?

I'm extremely impressed with the delivery and style, not to mention the
welcome sanity of the content.

jak

"William Warren" wrote in message
news:_P07b.390522$YN5.257733@sccrnsc01...
wrote in message
...
[snip]
I still don't have this all thought out completely, yet.

Rick WA1RKT

Rick,

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, many residents of the United States
decided to built "fallout shelters" in their homes to protect themselves
and
their loved ones from the affects of nuclear radiation. In preparing for
the
current threat universe, it's best to remember the lessons taught by a
history we are otherwise condemned to repeat.

First, fear is a lot easier to create than it is to control. The
psychological-warfare "experts" who planned and promoted the campaign to
make everyone afraid of the "Red Menace" soon found themselves inside the
tiger they had sought to ride, as the nation had a collective attack of
common sense and abandoned it's "shelters" to the dark corner of our
collective minds which we reserve for the insights we wish we never had.
At
the outset, the builders sought to keep their little rabbit warrens secret
because they'd been told that the unprepared Joes next door would invade
them, and at the end, they sought to keep them secret for fear that Joe
would laugh at their gullibility. Like the realization that our own feces
would quickly overwhelm the holding capacity of any but the most expensive
burrow or the least-accessible cavern, our collective consciousness soon
(or
soon enough) decided to look to a bright future instead of to a desolate
and
unthinkable meagerness.

Second, you can't spend your life being scared. It's a truism of modern
mass
media that what bleeds must lead, and that ** whatever-you-are-afraid-of
**
will be intoned every day during a breathless teaser for the Six O'Clock
News. Such tricks, however, can be turned only on young minds: those not
fully formed or experienced enough to look beyond the carnival barker's
cry.
That is, of course, fine for the Eyewitless News: only young people are
buying what they sell. The barker's cry, however, leaches out through the
co
tton convering the television loudspeaker, and climbs into our collective
world view via a sort of capillary action that poisons the blood of the
nation. Consider carefully the cost of the ride he promotes: survivors of
Stalin's purges; indeed, Solzhenitsyn himself, speak eloquently about the
point they reached where they decided that either death or deliverance was
preferable to the constant pain of hopelessness.

Third, it's more important to have a thousand friends than a thousand
rubbles. Those who survive a nuclear blast, whether inside the concussion
radius or not, will always be those in strong and well connected
communities, not the desperate few holed up in darkness or the dilusional
isolationists who assume that Olfput engines will enable them to prosper
in
a world where there's nowhere to go. It's a matrix of friends that will
see
us through a disaster, not the grid of terrorist greed that seeks a
Stalinist climate in which only steel matters and only cement is solid.

Technical professionals, such as we, must depend on a society where our
skills can be rendered useless by even so minor an event as a power
blackout. As a ham operator, I prepare for emergencies by keeping the
batteries in my HT up to date and a spare tent in the cellar, but I don't
(and with all respect, don't think you should) prepare for a
post-appocalyptic world in which there will be noone to talk to at the
other
end of the dial.

Atlas may, indeed, shrug: having lived both in San Francisco and Saigon, I
can sympathize with the discomfiture he seeks to relieve. Unlike Ayn Rand,
however, I don't choose to order my world with pledges never to depend on
someone else or to predict the destruction of bridges by unthinkable
weapons: even so great a Rand disciple as Allan Greenspan has spoken on
the
corrosive affects of irrational terror. My bridges are of the homemade
variety, across smaller chasms, but no less important than those Dabney
Taggert sought to protect, and they're made of people, not solder.

It's a sunny day outside my window. I'm going to say hello to my neighbor,
and offer to help him wire his house.

FWIW.

Bill

Copyright (C) 2003, William Warren. All Rights Reserved.

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