Tom Oliphant’s op-ed in the Globe today lays out the silliness of the government’s homeland defense act - the hypocrisy of its stern warnings at the same time as it shuffles money away from actually helping state and local workers responsible for protection. Combined with the newest recommendation, the article should give us extra pause to reconsider why a political appointee with no expertise is in charge of domestic defense.
But rather than simply lambaste Ridge and the Bushies’ policy, I’ll put forth a few ideas for the way domestic defense should be fashioned: 1) A warning system should not be based on our level of danger (risk is difficult to assess or understand anyway), rather than on levels of proscribed action for government officials, their private counterparts and the general citizenry; 2) The Homeland Security department should bring together high-profile experts in a visible way. We should not have a situation in which top experts are on television showing up the government’s recommendations to be rubbish; 3) the government should think of some way of disseminating information besides the mass media Â- if preventative measures are so important, why are we just hearing about them from ABC news in some haphazard manner? And 4) state governments, who cannot simply borrow or print money, desperately need financial help from the federal government.
Without such measures, the impression left is that the government officials are simply trying to cover their ass. Or else are congenitally stupid.
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