Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Then it happens!
17/January/2007 09:05 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 9, Issue 3
PDF copy
Change is a constant in this life. It happens daily, even if you do not like it. Sometimes that change is what we define as stupendous. The rest of the world would call it a disaster or a catastrophe. When you look at it in that negative respect, you must also assume that bad things happen by chance or fate. Then it is just human nature to assume if bad things happen by chance, then good things also happen by chance. Pretty soon we live in a world not only where everything happens by chance and fate, but there is no such thing as cause and effect. If that is the true state of the world, what is there to live for? We might as well just let the catastrophe take us out.
But contrary to what our culture would like us to believe, human beings are not wired that way. Even Darwinian evolution believes in the survival of the fittest. Surely if everything happens by sheer chance then there would not have evolved a reason or instinct to be the fittest survivor. Life by it’s very nature is programed to survive and to reproduce. Nothing at all in that construct has anything to do with random chance. As Dr. Spock would say, “That is completely illogical.”
So change happens, but we each have as we learned last week a command and control system in place to deal with those changes. We might have never considered them command and control systems, but that is actually what they are.
Stupendous change then is by definition something that takes you beyond or disrupts your command and control systems. Tuesday morning it snowed another two inches in my neck of the Seattle woods. Wasn’t it strange, most of the crazy people who were in such a hurry during the major six inch snow last week, either were no longer crazy, or had adapted their command and control system to deal with this new snow fall event.
Before the big snow hit last week, I went out and bought a gallon of Coleman fuel to fuel my white gas stove, that had no gas when the big wind storm took out the backyard tree and the power for two days. This stove will be a whole lot easier to cook my meals than that little backpacking stove of that experience. However, if I need to use this stove later this year, I made a mental note to do the cooking in the fireplace rather than out in the kitchen as I did with the backpacking stove. Carbon monoxide is one of those things that can kill and you would never know what hit you. Just asked those dudes who ran their gas generator indoors during that extended power outage. Well I guess you can’t ask them, they died.
So what should we try to prepare for when stupendous change takes place? The local emergency governmental disaster website 3days3ways.org asks the question, “Are you ready?” They then tell you to plan to have your command and control structure ready to handle whatever for 3 days, by doing it 3 ways. The three days is self explanatory, even if it is a figment of the imagination of FEMA, and the three ways are: make a plan, build a kit, and get involved.
Cool, or snowy, or windy, or earthquaky, how do you start? Well, from there everything on the website just sort of fizzles out into political correctness and platitudes. Part of the reasoning behind this is valid, for you to take responsibility for your reality, part is just political correctness and platitudes.
Since this is a series and also not sponsored by a politically correct organization, we shall dispense with all that and dig into the matter in detail over the next few weeks.
The main reason that FEMA and our local governments tell you to prepare for three days is that if you tell people the truth they just will not process the information. People will deny truth, they will procrastinate, they will just not look at the reality of a stupendous change event. If you use 3 days, more people will respond favorably than if you tell them the truth, plan for a week minimum. I suppose they have data to back up this psychology, but it may also be just a bureaucratic illusion.
Reality is, basically for three days in virtually any event, excluding life threatening injury or gross stupidity, you can gut it out. Beyond three days, you better have a real plan, and a real kit, and you really need to be involved, not with just your family, but your neighbors, and the larger community. I assume the preparedness assumption is that if you plan 3 days and take the proper steps you can gut it out for a week or longer. That is sort of verified in the case of Katrina and even in our recent Puget Sound hurricane type wind event.
The problem is, after 3 days the novelty has worn off. Then and only then, when you run out of gas, things get serious. You need more gas to run the generator. The dried foods you have put away begin to taste like dry foods you put away. Your stress level is rising, because you are definitely tired, maybe really cold, or wet, or something else, you need less stress, not more stress.
For day one, candles and fireplace heat is fine as the house temperature drops to fifty. The next night your wood stockpile keeps it above forty, but there is really not much that you can do by candle light. That also works the third night, but by morning you are out of wood. This is not fun and games, especially when you realize, that with a different light source and more wood, some food that you would actually eat the rest of the time, and a means to cook it without potentially killing yourself with carbon monoxide fumes, things would not be nice, but they wouldn’t be truly trying your stupendous limits.
Put in the proper context, now you realize that your hopes to establish normal command and control have been extended, no exceeded, this time without emergency resources at your disposal. This rightfully is not going to make you a real happy camper. A full week’s worth of readied supplies will remove some of those stress factors.
So what really is required after stupendous change, minute one? Then we will proceed forward from there. Normal command and control that you expect from your community has gone down. If you can get through to 911 they might respond to life threatening injury or fire, provided they can get to you and their limited resources are not committed to other more pressing problems. You are alone in the reality of present circumstance, time, and place.
As far as serious trauma, about all you can do without true medical help is react in this ABCD order: A for Airway, B for breathing, C for Circulation or bleeding, D for Defibrillation, and then treat for shock. Beyond that, you need real professional help as soon as possible. Anything less than real trauma, you will probably just have to treat with any first aid supplies you have put into your kit and have learned to use.
The next survival thing you need to realize is that the human body core temperature needs to be maintained at essentially 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees C). Hypothermia, means you need warmth. It can occur because of medical conditions and other causes very easily, but once the environmental temperature drops into the fifties in Fahrenheit and teens in Celsius, everyone should be cognizant of real potential problems. Essentially that means staying dry, protection from the wind and not wearing any cotton materials, especially wet cotton materials, to help maintain body warmth.
Here is where your plans and your kit begin to have an impact. That is because your kit really needs to be part of your regular stuff. It is cool to have a big box full of gear in a safe place around your house, but if you dress appropriate to pending stupendous change conditions your risk in all senses is going to be greatly reduced as you try to get from work to home. Preparedness starts with what you are wearing.
I like wool. I know poly of every type, color, and design is now the greatest in foul weather gear, but it is marketed as really great because it is really cheap to make and profitable to sell. As I started doing research for this series, I began to realize just how little wool is available these days, at least in the United States. Cotton is everywhere, wool is really hard to find and it is expensive. A wool shirt if you can find it, on sale is over $50, a real Pendleton wool shirt will set you back close to $100.
True poly pile fleece garments are widely available, but a lot of cotton looks and feels the same, you must read the label. Without a wind shell or fancy manufacturing, wind really flows through pile. While poly fleece continues to insulate even when wet, it still is not quite as effective in my mind as natural wool. So why not cotton? If you are expecting any sort of weather in which you might get wet, suffice to say cotton kills. A quotation marked Google search for “cotton kills” turned up 12,500 hits. (Shortly 12,502.)
Everyone says when out in the wilderness, woods, or other outdoor activities you should wear layers. That outer layer, should be, “waterproof, windproof, and breathable.” That might be true if you are a member of the “Gore-Tex” demonstration team. Short of that I have not found anything that will do the job as advertised.
I also know of a world class mountain climber who lives in Spokane who wears rubber for his outer layer. His comments are that everything will eventually leak, especially when you don’t need or want leaks. Rubber can be vented just like everything else and body moisture can be better controlled by wearing proper under layers. Actually the best shell I have for moderately foul weather is an old Eddie Bauer nylon parka, treated with high dosages of water repellence spray, it does the best overall job of all my stuff. For real bad weather I have a heavy weight, waterproof coated nylon parka similar to what commercial Alaska fishermen wear.
This clothing discussion is designed to help you change the way you look at life. By definition stupendous change comes when you are not expecting it. Therefore, it is mostly in how you look at it, for the possibility of stupendous change can occur anywhere, at any time. If, or when it does happen, it really is not a stupendous change event at all if you are truly prepared, but just part of all the routine changes of life.
Again, as we continue to tie this whole article together, as well as the whole series. Your most important asset in any stupendous change event is a positive mental attitude (PMA). Your most important resource is prayer. The two are interrelated or synergistic, not mutually exclusive.
If you peruse all the survival and planning for disaster literature, most of what you will find are stuff lists. A lot of sources will discuss how your attitude affects your ability to make it through the situation. A few will even mention the spiritual side of man and how you need to be in contact with that spirit to do well in survival situations. Some will ridicule that as phony religion for the weak, it is truly the well trained, relying only on their own ingenuity, that is the key to survival, here, there, or everywhere.
Many years ago, I took a wilderness survival course from a former Air Force survival instructor. Before it was not politically correct to say such a thing, he said that prayer is the one thing that everyone who survived a true life threatening survival circumstance had in common. He said that prayer was present in like 99 percent of the survivors. Eliminating so called serious fatal accidents and the like, that surely opens up the question, what attributes did those who should have survived share, or what resource did they not utilize.
There is a God that a human personality can call upon in times of trouble. It seems that survivors make that call. He is truly all that you can rely upon when even your stupendous change command and control structure fails. When, if it were not for emotional doubt, you would have no emotions at all, God is there. When all your training and experiences fail to give you a vision of the way forward, God is there. Then comes the assurance available for all human beings, that when you come to the end of you, God has just gotten you to the place you may glimpse His glory. But then God gives you this almost obvious idea, that you use to move forward and even can take ownership, it can blow your mind, as you realize your mind is really quite finite.
With God, change is designed into the universe. Some of that we may choose to call it stupendous change, or even accidents, disasters, catastrophes. With God everything only happens for His eternal purpose. At such times, what the Bible describes as the “peace that surpasses understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus,” changes our attitude and our lives from that point forward (Philippians 4:7).
PDF copy
Change is a constant in this life. It happens daily, even if you do not like it. Sometimes that change is what we define as stupendous. The rest of the world would call it a disaster or a catastrophe. When you look at it in that negative respect, you must also assume that bad things happen by chance or fate. Then it is just human nature to assume if bad things happen by chance, then good things also happen by chance. Pretty soon we live in a world not only where everything happens by chance and fate, but there is no such thing as cause and effect. If that is the true state of the world, what is there to live for? We might as well just let the catastrophe take us out.
But contrary to what our culture would like us to believe, human beings are not wired that way. Even Darwinian evolution believes in the survival of the fittest. Surely if everything happens by sheer chance then there would not have evolved a reason or instinct to be the fittest survivor. Life by it’s very nature is programed to survive and to reproduce. Nothing at all in that construct has anything to do with random chance. As Dr. Spock would say, “That is completely illogical.”
So change happens, but we each have as we learned last week a command and control system in place to deal with those changes. We might have never considered them command and control systems, but that is actually what they are.
Stupendous change then is by definition something that takes you beyond or disrupts your command and control systems. Tuesday morning it snowed another two inches in my neck of the Seattle woods. Wasn’t it strange, most of the crazy people who were in such a hurry during the major six inch snow last week, either were no longer crazy, or had adapted their command and control system to deal with this new snow fall event.
Before the big snow hit last week, I went out and bought a gallon of Coleman fuel to fuel my white gas stove, that had no gas when the big wind storm took out the backyard tree and the power for two days. This stove will be a whole lot easier to cook my meals than that little backpacking stove of that experience. However, if I need to use this stove later this year, I made a mental note to do the cooking in the fireplace rather than out in the kitchen as I did with the backpacking stove. Carbon monoxide is one of those things that can kill and you would never know what hit you. Just asked those dudes who ran their gas generator indoors during that extended power outage. Well I guess you can’t ask them, they died.
So what should we try to prepare for when stupendous change takes place? The local emergency governmental disaster website 3days3ways.org asks the question, “Are you ready?” They then tell you to plan to have your command and control structure ready to handle whatever for 3 days, by doing it 3 ways. The three days is self explanatory, even if it is a figment of the imagination of FEMA, and the three ways are: make a plan, build a kit, and get involved.
Cool, or snowy, or windy, or earthquaky, how do you start? Well, from there everything on the website just sort of fizzles out into political correctness and platitudes. Part of the reasoning behind this is valid, for you to take responsibility for your reality, part is just political correctness and platitudes.
Since this is a series and also not sponsored by a politically correct organization, we shall dispense with all that and dig into the matter in detail over the next few weeks.
The main reason that FEMA and our local governments tell you to prepare for three days is that if you tell people the truth they just will not process the information. People will deny truth, they will procrastinate, they will just not look at the reality of a stupendous change event. If you use 3 days, more people will respond favorably than if you tell them the truth, plan for a week minimum. I suppose they have data to back up this psychology, but it may also be just a bureaucratic illusion.
Reality is, basically for three days in virtually any event, excluding life threatening injury or gross stupidity, you can gut it out. Beyond three days, you better have a real plan, and a real kit, and you really need to be involved, not with just your family, but your neighbors, and the larger community. I assume the preparedness assumption is that if you plan 3 days and take the proper steps you can gut it out for a week or longer. That is sort of verified in the case of Katrina and even in our recent Puget Sound hurricane type wind event.
The problem is, after 3 days the novelty has worn off. Then and only then, when you run out of gas, things get serious. You need more gas to run the generator. The dried foods you have put away begin to taste like dry foods you put away. Your stress level is rising, because you are definitely tired, maybe really cold, or wet, or something else, you need less stress, not more stress.
For day one, candles and fireplace heat is fine as the house temperature drops to fifty. The next night your wood stockpile keeps it above forty, but there is really not much that you can do by candle light. That also works the third night, but by morning you are out of wood. This is not fun and games, especially when you realize, that with a different light source and more wood, some food that you would actually eat the rest of the time, and a means to cook it without potentially killing yourself with carbon monoxide fumes, things would not be nice, but they wouldn’t be truly trying your stupendous limits.
Put in the proper context, now you realize that your hopes to establish normal command and control have been extended, no exceeded, this time without emergency resources at your disposal. This rightfully is not going to make you a real happy camper. A full week’s worth of readied supplies will remove some of those stress factors.
So what really is required after stupendous change, minute one? Then we will proceed forward from there. Normal command and control that you expect from your community has gone down. If you can get through to 911 they might respond to life threatening injury or fire, provided they can get to you and their limited resources are not committed to other more pressing problems. You are alone in the reality of present circumstance, time, and place.
As far as serious trauma, about all you can do without true medical help is react in this ABCD order: A for Airway, B for breathing, C for Circulation or bleeding, D for Defibrillation, and then treat for shock. Beyond that, you need real professional help as soon as possible. Anything less than real trauma, you will probably just have to treat with any first aid supplies you have put into your kit and have learned to use.
The next survival thing you need to realize is that the human body core temperature needs to be maintained at essentially 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees C). Hypothermia, means you need warmth. It can occur because of medical conditions and other causes very easily, but once the environmental temperature drops into the fifties in Fahrenheit and teens in Celsius, everyone should be cognizant of real potential problems. Essentially that means staying dry, protection from the wind and not wearing any cotton materials, especially wet cotton materials, to help maintain body warmth.
Here is where your plans and your kit begin to have an impact. That is because your kit really needs to be part of your regular stuff. It is cool to have a big box full of gear in a safe place around your house, but if you dress appropriate to pending stupendous change conditions your risk in all senses is going to be greatly reduced as you try to get from work to home. Preparedness starts with what you are wearing.
I like wool. I know poly of every type, color, and design is now the greatest in foul weather gear, but it is marketed as really great because it is really cheap to make and profitable to sell. As I started doing research for this series, I began to realize just how little wool is available these days, at least in the United States. Cotton is everywhere, wool is really hard to find and it is expensive. A wool shirt if you can find it, on sale is over $50, a real Pendleton wool shirt will set you back close to $100.
True poly pile fleece garments are widely available, but a lot of cotton looks and feels the same, you must read the label. Without a wind shell or fancy manufacturing, wind really flows through pile. While poly fleece continues to insulate even when wet, it still is not quite as effective in my mind as natural wool. So why not cotton? If you are expecting any sort of weather in which you might get wet, suffice to say cotton kills. A quotation marked Google search for “cotton kills” turned up 12,500 hits. (Shortly 12,502.)
Everyone says when out in the wilderness, woods, or other outdoor activities you should wear layers. That outer layer, should be, “waterproof, windproof, and breathable.” That might be true if you are a member of the “Gore-Tex” demonstration team. Short of that I have not found anything that will do the job as advertised.
I also know of a world class mountain climber who lives in Spokane who wears rubber for his outer layer. His comments are that everything will eventually leak, especially when you don’t need or want leaks. Rubber can be vented just like everything else and body moisture can be better controlled by wearing proper under layers. Actually the best shell I have for moderately foul weather is an old Eddie Bauer nylon parka, treated with high dosages of water repellence spray, it does the best overall job of all my stuff. For real bad weather I have a heavy weight, waterproof coated nylon parka similar to what commercial Alaska fishermen wear.
This clothing discussion is designed to help you change the way you look at life. By definition stupendous change comes when you are not expecting it. Therefore, it is mostly in how you look at it, for the possibility of stupendous change can occur anywhere, at any time. If, or when it does happen, it really is not a stupendous change event at all if you are truly prepared, but just part of all the routine changes of life.
Again, as we continue to tie this whole article together, as well as the whole series. Your most important asset in any stupendous change event is a positive mental attitude (PMA). Your most important resource is prayer. The two are interrelated or synergistic, not mutually exclusive.
If you peruse all the survival and planning for disaster literature, most of what you will find are stuff lists. A lot of sources will discuss how your attitude affects your ability to make it through the situation. A few will even mention the spiritual side of man and how you need to be in contact with that spirit to do well in survival situations. Some will ridicule that as phony religion for the weak, it is truly the well trained, relying only on their own ingenuity, that is the key to survival, here, there, or everywhere.
Many years ago, I took a wilderness survival course from a former Air Force survival instructor. Before it was not politically correct to say such a thing, he said that prayer is the one thing that everyone who survived a true life threatening survival circumstance had in common. He said that prayer was present in like 99 percent of the survivors. Eliminating so called serious fatal accidents and the like, that surely opens up the question, what attributes did those who should have survived share, or what resource did they not utilize.
There is a God that a human personality can call upon in times of trouble. It seems that survivors make that call. He is truly all that you can rely upon when even your stupendous change command and control structure fails. When, if it were not for emotional doubt, you would have no emotions at all, God is there. When all your training and experiences fail to give you a vision of the way forward, God is there. Then comes the assurance available for all human beings, that when you come to the end of you, God has just gotten you to the place you may glimpse His glory. But then God gives you this almost obvious idea, that you use to move forward and even can take ownership, it can blow your mind, as you realize your mind is really quite finite.
With God, change is designed into the universe. Some of that we may choose to call it stupendous change, or even accidents, disasters, catastrophes. With God everything only happens for His eternal purpose. At such times, what the Bible describes as the “peace that surpasses understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus,” changes our attitude and our lives from that point forward (Philippians 4:7).