There's a telling story in the Washington Post today in a column by Claire Berlinski.
....a revealing drama on a Paris sidewalk: A shady-looking character ran up the street. Suddenly, a man wearing the familiar outfit of a French waiter rushed up behind him, yelling at him to stop, then charged into him, knocking him to the ground with a clatter. The waiter straddled the man and began slapping his face, calling him a filthy thief.
A police motorcycle roared up. Off hopped a cop who could not have been more than 25. He interposed himself between the thief and the waiter, and then, with his finger in the air, began a lecture. Never raising his voice, he told the infuriated waiter that no matter what the thief might have stolen -- some customer's wallet, it seems -- he had no right to settle matters privately. The policeman outlined the procedure for filing a civil or criminal complaint.
Then he said, slowly and quite distinctly: "In France, we have the law."
Now the policeman did take the alleged thief into custody and the waiter shouldn't have slapped the man, but it struck me quite forcibly as explaining something about the French character.
The sense of personal responsibility has been so attenuated that people expect the government to solve their problems and if someone exercises initiative, say in catching a thief, it's immediately questioned.
After all, 15,000 (or was 20,000?) seniors died in France during the summer of 2003 because of a protracted heat wave and neither their children nor government officials bothered to come back from vacation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, "Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility."
If you are unwilling to take responsibility, you don't act, you do nothing.
You have to depend on your own good sense and preparation to survive if something terrible happens, a terrorist attack, a fire, or in what seems increasingly likely next year or the next two or three, a pandemic of avian flu.
You have to depend on your own good sense and preparation to survive because the federal government, state and local governments are not prepared as they should be and never will be.
This used to be commonly accepted. Louisa May Alcott wrote, "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship."
First a terrific example of good sense from Wired. -Question Authorities
For nearly four years - steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them - civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do.....
After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.
Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.
HI Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing
As for preparation, more to come.