Students Should Hear Obama’s Speech (Even if it’s Political Brainwashing)

I’m certainly not one of those people who rode the tidal wave of blind enthusiasm when Obama was elected President.  If Obama and I sat down over lunch and started discussing politics, we would surely have hearty disagreements over key issues.  However, addressing school children in a speech at the beginning of the school year is not one of them.  Conservatives are sorely mistaken on this issue.

We live in a country that espouses certain liberties as nothing less than sacred.  Among these rights is one’s right to speak freely, which is one of the key liberties protected by the 1st Amendment.  The President certainly has this right just as much as anyone else in this country.  Although conservatives are not actually abridging his freedom of speech, their criticism of Obama’s speech to school students runs counter to the spirit of the our 1st Amendment freedom of speech, which is one of our central civic values.

Some conservative critics are worried that President Obama is trying to indoctrinate our children.  Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that this is the case.  So what?  We shouldn’t sheild our kids’ from Obama’s speech even if it is his intent to politically indoctrinate them.  One of the purposes of education should be to expose children to a wide range of views, including those of the current President and his party.  Some may disagree wholeheartedly with his views, but it shouldn’t be our goal to censor our children from them.  We should, instead, seek to expose our kids to these views and help them understand the substance behind the controversies that are alive on our political stage.  If conservatives are concerned with the content of Obama’s message, they should field a message of their own and pressure educators into presenting their views alongside those of Obama or anyone else they oppose.

Besides, it would’ve been more politically strategic for Republicans to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.  Let the man have his say and then, after he’s made the speech, analyze its content.  Determine after the speech has been given if the intent was to indoctrinate students and, if it was, then field an adequate response to the speech.  Criticizing the speech before he had given it only serves to create controversy where none should yet exist.

Americans are not stupid.  If Obama’s intent was to indoctrinate students, his remarks would not have gone unchecked.  Republicans should stop demanding censorship and, instead, embrace whatever might arise out of this event.

Examining the politics of self-defense

Popularized even more after tragedies such as the ones at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinios, among others, is the notion that someone with a gun may have been able to put a stop to the all the horror before police arrived on scene.  This idea has sparked new debate over gun control, including proposals to allow college students to carry concealed weapons on campuses.  Two recent ABC News segments I recently watched (here and here), titled “If Only I Had a Gun…” and “Shooting Under Fire” take a closer look at the issue.

The segments bring up some good points, which are worth consideration.  However, despite this fact, I can’t help but see the view these segments inevitably promote: a view favorable toward gun control.  Although, at first glance, one who is less seasoned in the debate may view these segments as authoritative (after all, there were real police officers involved in the discussion), they fail to convince me that added gun restrictions will make us safer.

The segments emphasize the difficulty of circumstances involving active shooters.  It focuses on the physiological impediments to reacting quickly and decisively during such critical, stressful events.  There is merit to exploring this aspect of self-defense.  Training is, indeed, critical to overcoming physiological disadvantages.  The current training requirements to obtain a concealed carry permit in Ohio do not adequately prepare one for a real, live threat to one’s own life.  This much is true.  However, I argue that the purpose of concealed carry training is not to effectively prepare people to become as skillful as law enforcement.  It’s purpose is simply to orient a person to the basics involved with carrying a concealed firearm.  That’s it.

Furthermore, there are some circumstances of the practice excercises in the ABC News segments that obscure what might really happen in active shooter scenarios.  First, in the scenarios where the experiment’s participant had a gun during a lecture about protective headgear, it seemed likely that the mock shooter knew who in the classroom was in possession of the firearm.  Therefore, as soon as he entered the room, he knew who to target.  In real active shooter scenarios, the shooter is not necessarily going to have the advantage of knowing that information in advance.  

It was also blatantly apparent that the test participants were aware of the fact that the weapons they were in possession of did not have live ammunition loaded.  One of the common complaints made in the ABC segments was that the mock victim who was being tested did not take cover appropriately.  Now, I’m not suggesting that these people should’ve been trying to shoot each other with live ammo during a training excercise.  However, I am suggesting that the awareness that this was not a real situation was likely a factor that influenced the participants’ behavior.  Perhaps this affected the decision of some participants not to take cover first.

The second point, that the excercise participants knew the ammo is not lethal, works the other way too.  The mock shooters also knew that they were being confronted in a fake scenario, with fake ammunition.  While much is made of the difficulty of a potential victim’s stress level during such a confrontation, what about the stress level of a real shooter who has just found out that one of his vicitms is not going down without a fight?  School shooters have, in the past, been depicted as cold-blooded killers who showed no emotion as they went on their rampages.  But, remember, that school shooters deliberately chose an environment where they have the comfort of knowing their victims will not fight back.  The law specifically gives potential active shooters this advantage; legal prohibitions against firearms in places like college campuses virtually hands future criminals a map of where they can get away with shooting and killing their peers.

In any event, the mock offender’s awareness of the incident as a training excercise enables him to focus on shooting his victim much more comfortably then he would in a real incident.  In essence, the ABC News excercise has given quite a few tactical advantages to the mock offender (who, I believe was a police officer anyway, right?) and failed to account for other, confounding variables.

Ultimately, defending yourself is your right.  Yes, you do have to train yourself in order to maximize your response should the inevitable happen.  But, to argue that inadequate training dismisses your right to defend yourself against an attack is nonsense.  Take the above-linked ABC News segments with a grain of salt, as one should with everything (including what is written here).  Although they didn’t come out and say it, the implication was there.  If ABC News had it their way, you’d leave your guns at home.

An AC adapter showdown at Sam’s Club

Yesterday, I got a deal on a netbook: the Acer Aspire One.  Briefly, it’s specs are as follows:1.60GHz, 160GB, 8.9″ LCD.  The list price was $256.84.  However, when I walked into Sam’s Club yesterday, only the display model was left.  The store marked down that unit to $200.00 simply because they wanted to get rid of it.  I was more than happy to be the one to take that final netbook off of their hands.

The customer service associate I was dealing with was a nice, old man.  He fiddled with the anti-theft locking mechanism attached to the device for a couple of minutes before leaving to verify he was using the right combination.  When he came back, he told me that another one of the same netbooks had just been returned by a woman who didn’t realize she wasn’t getting the full functionality of a notebook when she made her purchase.  I verified that he was going to sell it to me for the same price and approached the customer service counter with him.

When I arrived at the counter, he grabbed the box containing my netbook from a dolly behind me and placed it on the counter.  He told them to override the list price and charge me $200.00.  They complied.  Minutes later, I walked out the store with the device in hand.

I got in my car and briefly checked the contents of the box.  Inside, there was the netbook and a mouse, but no AC adapter.  I promptly went back inside and asked for them to get me an AC adapter.  This is when they realized they had made  a mistake and not followed their store policies correctly.  They sold me the netbook without “checking it into claims” first.  An old woman at the customer service counter tried to pull a fast one on me; she told me it was sold to me “as is” – to which I immediately objected.  I then told her it was the returned item I purchased, to which she replied, “We never should of sold you that.”

Too late.  ”You already did sell it to me.”

“You need to bring it back.”

Bullshit.  A sale is a sale.  I wasn’t about to march back into the store and surrender what I had legitimately purchased.  I confronted her on the issue, pressing her to give me my AC adapter.

“We don’t have one.”

“Well then you better go get one.”

In the meantime, her co-workers contacted a manager who seemed unaware of the minor verbal dispute that was ensuing just feet away.  He ran off somewhere and retrieved the adapter, which someone had forgotten to put back into the box.

All that for an AC adapter.  But having shaved about $60.00 off of the final price tag, it was worth it.

The Triage Log: Introducing the name and the concept

Fundamentally, at the root of it all, this is really just a personal blog.  Those who know me know that I have an interest in writing.  This is, quite simply, the vehicle that I use to fulfill my interest in writing.  However, the blog name has some significance and I’ll do my best to explain it here.

In times past, when I’ve started other blogs, I’ve tried to be creative in coming up with names that sounded cool and fit my personality.  To date, I believe all of those attempts were a dismal failure.  Perhaps it has to do, in large part, with the fact that I’m highly self-critical when it comes to my writing.  But, the truth of the matter is, I’ve never been satisfied with any name I’ve come up with for a blog.  I think this time is different.

Triage is a process paramedics use during mass-casualty incidents; it is the method by which they determine the priority of a patient’s condition.  I’m drawn to this in large part because of my affiliation with the field of public safety.  To briefly sum up my experince: I’m currently a police dispatcher.  I also did a brief stint as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician.  Since I find myself spending a lot of time at work, I often find myself making mental connections between abstract ideas about life and concepts in public safety.  The name of this blog arose from that tendency.

I’m still in my early 20s, but life has instilled enough wisdom in me for me to know this much: human life, not just emergencies, rely on a form of mental triage.  The importance we assign to various decisions, opportunities, etc, define how we eventually go forward in addressing the issues that arise in our lives.  Just as paramedics tag patients with triage tags, we mentally “tag” the various decisions we’re faced with on a daily basis.  Perhaps this takes a concrete form, such as when we mark an e-mail message as urgent before we send it, or perhaps not.  I think it tends to mostly happen in the milliseconds before we actually make a decison to act.  For example, let’s say that two people called you and you need to call both back.  Your mental triage process is illustrated simply by who you decide to call back first.

This is The Triage Log, which means that it is a log of those things I’ve determined to be important during my own process of mental triage.  A stretch at creativity?  Perhaps, but it works for me.  For now, anyway.