![]() ![]() "I don't know what Tom Ridge is planning for us, but as of now they haven't articulated a domestic program in which ordinary Americans can participate, and as a result we feel just as impotent against a terrorist attack now as we did in the 1960s against a nuclear attack." Now it's everyone go on high alert, but go about your business, go to the ballgame, go to the mall," said Laura McEnaney, a history professor at Whittier College and author of Civil Defense Begins at Home. They said where they wanted people to go, what they wanted them to do. ![]() "The government isn't really defining the threats. What is overreacting? What is under-reacting? Are we heading back to a Cold War bunker mentality? Should we be? Fifty gallons of water on standby? Maybe so. Should you have a gas mask? Probably not. How do you protect yourself and your family in your home? Well, that depends. Today, it's less large-scale, but more pernicious: who knows who, from who knows where, doing who knows what.Īs a result, civil defense, in its reborn and still evolving form, is a fuzzier notion this time around. Then, there was one enemy, and it was Russia one threat, and it was nuclear annihilation - or at least something so close to it that life afterward wouldn't be worth surviving. ![]() That we can't pick one image that sums up our fear is one way it's different this time. what? The crumbling World Trade Center? The airliner? The envelope? White powder? The question mark? Solace, once found in having an underground shelter in your backyard, is now a bottle of Cipro in your refrigerator.Īnd the one symbol that said it all - the mushroom cloud - has been replaced by. Refuge, once to be taken in your basement, is now, most likely, to be taken upstairs. "Homeland security" has replaced "civil defense." A wily bin Laden has replaced a shoe-banging Khrushchev. ![]()
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