It is interesting to travel in Europe where "fear" is not the over riding reason for doing anything. But fear comes as a result of chaos. Moore was right...Americans DO live in fear, and sometimes the fear is justified. I don't know how to "fix" this, or even if it should be fixed because after all, it is not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you. It is a subtle and pervasive thing. I have never walked into a tavern in Montreal and suddenly all the conversation stopped and everybody looked at me like they did in DC. In the military, we had a phrase "the realistic assessment of threat". We assumed (by the nature of a military) that there always was a threat, the problem was to analyze that threat and to deal with it appropriately. In our training, we had scenarios...for instance, how will you handle a large number of protesters at the embassy. We decided that it would not be appropriate to pepper spray a group of "Mothers Protesting against Drugs". These are what professionals do....analyze threats. Non-professionals (non duly disorganized militia) react in unpredictable ways. This results in chaos, to a greater or lesser extent. Most nations prefer the predictable, even if it is a bad thing. America is the only nation which seems to believe that chaos is preferable to, um, non-chaos. (law?) Again, like I said, I really don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I lean toward "good thing", but I have not really sat down and thought as long and hard about it as maybe I should have. Funny, I always go back to first principles....Washington, Payne, Franklin, MacDonald, Van Horne, and others, and see if we have got the countries they expected us to get with their "radical" (for the time) ideas. I keep thinking that we got the wrong British Empire, and got the wrong Republic. And somehow, I am not sure where we took the wrong turn.
Found here.
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It is interesting to travel in Europe where "fear" is not the over riding reason for doing anything. But fear comes as a result of chaos.
Moore was right...Americans DO live in fear, and sometimes the fear is justified. I don't know how to "fix" this, or even if it should be fixed because after all, it is not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you.
It is a subtle and pervasive thing. I have never walked into a tavern in Montreal and suddenly all the conversation stopped and everybody looked at me like they did in DC.
In the military, we had a phrase "the realistic assessment of threat". We assumed (by the nature of a military) that there always was a threat, the problem was to analyze that threat and to deal with it appropriately. In our training, we had scenarios...for instance, how will you handle a large number of protesters at the embassy. We decided that it would not be appropriate to pepper spray a group of "Mothers Protesting against Drugs". These are what professionals do....analyze threats. Non-professionals (non duly disorganized militia) react in unpredictable ways. This results in chaos, to a greater or lesser extent. Most nations prefer the predictable, even if it is a bad thing. America is the only nation which seems to believe that chaos is preferable to, um, non-chaos. (law?)
Again, like I said, I really don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I lean toward "good thing", but I have not really sat down and thought as long and hard about it as maybe I should have.
Funny, I always go back to first principles....Washington, Payne, Franklin, MacDonald, Van Horne, and others, and see if we have got the countries they expected us to get with their "radical" (for the time) ideas. I keep thinking that we got the wrong British Empire, and got the wrong Republic. And somehow, I am not sure where we took the wrong turn.
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