FEMA for Kids

IN THE NEWS
Last week, I chided the Department of Homeland Security for its content-free Ready.gov web site. It's content-free, except for some recycled advice on disaster readiness for earthquakes, floods, tornados, and fires. Unfortunately, if you're a concerned citizen who wants to be ready for terrorist attack, there's nothing to be learned there.

If you want to volunteer in the war against al Qaeda, you can follow the links from Ready.gov to the Citizen Corps web site. You'll find all kinds of useful guidelines for taking independent study courses on disaster relief, finding your local "Points of Light Volunteer Center," or joining your local neighborhood watch. Unfortunately, again, everything here, too, looks exactly like the normal disaster readiness programs--because they are.

Click the Back button in your browser a couple of times to return to the Ready.gov web site, and you'll be hard-pressed not to click on the intriguing FEMA for Kids link. Children share with their parents night terrors about terrorist attack. The Department of Homeland Security would provide a great public service by helping them exorcise the terrorist ghost hiding in their closet. And, unfortunately, yet again, all the information on this site is geared toward general disaster preparedness, this time written and formatted for children.

When future historians depict this age, one of its striking characteristics will be what's missing from the picture. After 9/11, Americans discovered reasons to be afraid of people whom they either didn't know, and therefore faded into the anonymity of daily life, or they knew, and now distrusted. That man dropping a parcel in a trashcan--is he a terrorist planting a bomb. The Iraqi exile who owns the local video store--is he secretly plotting the downfall of the United States in the back room? The Middle Eastern cab driver taking me to the airport--should I watch what I say to him?

Guidance on who is a suspicious character, what constitutes suspicious activity, and to whom you should report it is therefore vital if we really believe that Americans live on the knife's edge of imminent terrorist attack. You'll be lucky to find even the most minimal information, including guidance on managing similar risks while you're traveling outside the United States.

By one important measure, helping you and me as average citizens handle the newly-discovered terrorist threat, the Bush Administration has failed. From their inception, no one took the color-coded alerts seriously as a guide to action. And, apparently, nobody in the Department of Homeland Security bothered to write some basic information for average citizens (including kids).

Apparently, the Administration is content to let children ask, "Mom, Dad, should I be afraid of terrorism?" without getting an answer. Except, perhaps, the sheepish admission that adults also have imaginary terrorists hiding in their closets.

Comments

[Oscar]

Excellent post. Having been in grade school in the 50's I know what worring about foreign monsters can be like for a kid. This is one area you and I totally agree on (bet you didn't think there was one): GWB has done a poor job in communicating what is going on. His first impulse, "continue shopping and act normal" was not bad, as it would show we weren't afraid, and the probability of further attacks is low (even if the potential damage is high) - sort of like folks in St. Louis worrying about the BIG Earthquake. But his later communications have not been good. I don't know if this is a problem of distrusting a left-leaning press or what, but it is GWB's job to get it right.

[ali]

In Belfast we were told to report suspicious packages, not to leave suspicious packages lying around, there was a confidential telephone number for informers, and we had to be reminded to panic during bomb alerts.

The truth is there is very little a population can do about terrorism apart from getting bored by the risks and carrying on as normal. Herman the happy hermit crab is actually a fairly appropriate image.

[Kingdaddy]

Ali, that's exactly the type of advice that Americans aren't getting now. Warnings about suspicious parcels may not seem like much, but the British government has always sounded like it had very specific knowledge about the IRA's targets and methods. The US government in the last few weeks, has acted as though it had no idea who the terrorists in the US were (otherwise, why aren't they arrested?), when they are planning to attack, and how. The British security services may not have known everything that the IRA was doing, but it new something. The US government, on the other hand, acts and talks as though it knows nothing about al Qaeda.

That's probably an unfair conclusion. However, the hard, clever, and dangerous work that is likely being done today by people on the front lines (FBI agents, CIA analysts, NSA communications intercept specialists, etc.) isn't visible in what Ridge, Bush, Rice, et al. have been representing about US efforts. And it's not beyond imagination that the decision-making at the top levels isn't building on this work.

[ff14rmt]

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