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Health & Fitness

Survival Oriented Book Review, CERT Response Important

We need to encourage "a culture of preparedness" for natural and other mass casualty disasters.

Lt. General Honore’s book has been an inspiration to me, as I have mentioned in earlier articles.  But another, completely different but survival-oriented book I recommend is by a Los Angeles and New York journalist, Neil Strauss, raised by urban parents in Chicago who weren’t into camping or the outdoors.  It is called EMERGENCY:  THIS BOOK CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE (ISBN 9780060898779)I gave copies of it to my grown son and daughter for Christmas last year, and I mention that because this is an adult book.  Neil writes in the first person. His language is too strong for a lot of people—particularly children—so this book isn’t for everyone.

The context of much of his book is his lifestyle as an adventurous single man with an understanding girlfriend.  Given that disclaimer, I still recommend it as it tells the story of his being freaked out after many natural disasters earlier this decade and his response to them, which was to pursue every way he thought of to escape financial ruin and beat anything that might impair his chances of physical survival, should all hell break loose. It has a happy ending, however, because his journey leads him to be a decent neighbor and community volunteer with a genuine desire to help others right around him. 

Though I want you to read the book for yourselves because it is not just enlightening but entertaining, I will tell you that he starts out looking for alternative citizenship so he can move his assets out of this country and have a safe haven not only for those assets but for himself.  He expends a crazy amount of time, money and energy on that project, which made me think he was paranoid to the point of possible mental illness.  But I kept reading because the only way I move toward a fair assessment about persons I’m skeptical about is to give them the benefit of the doubt or at least to suspend my disbelief in their ways until I have enough information to draw an intelligent conclusion. Strauss probably anticipated having readers like me, and he did not disappoint me in terms of keeping me interested in what he was going to do next, which was to go from one survivalist expert to another. I learned there is a parallel universe to the one I inhabit which has many people who are really adept at living in adverse circumstances, especially out in nature, and these gurus make their livings conducting seminars for the rest of us who want to toughen up.  Strauss went to great lengths to study with these masters.  He also acquired a couple of firearms and the ability to shoot them, and invested in transportation modes that could take him not only through all terrains, but over the tops of other vehicles in case he was caught in a slow, mass evacuation that was putting his life at too much risk.  Funny how he went to this extreme, given how earlier in the book he threw caution to the winds and put himself at risk countless times to prove to himself that he could become a survivalist.  I just couldn’t help but notice how illogical this seemed to me.  But he is him, and I am me, and life is full of persons making differing decisions as to how to go from point A to point B at any given time. 

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Yet I give him credit for coming out of all this a changed person.  After being exposed to all this self-centered new knowledge and skill, and even though his alternative citizenship scheme worked out, he was transformed by all his new experiences.  He actually got his certification as an EMT and became active in a program in the Los Angeles vicinity, which is similar to one we, here in southwest St. Louis County, can train to be a part of in our local area.  Ours is Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).  I heard from a CERT volunteer last week. I hope to be in touch with him this week and to have him share more. 

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