Useful or Not

"Anybody can have the will to win but not everybody has the will to prepare to win."

A old coach of mine used to say that to me all the time and the older I get, the more I see the truth in this statement. At a geopolitical level, it's why I'm not afraid of Al Qaeda. I'm well aware of the damage they can do as well as have done but I'm not fundamentally scared of them. Why? Because any fool can strap a bomb on and blow himself up. That requires no skill and because of that is limited in the overall damage done. But few of those guys have the discipline required to spend years honing a craft and warfare is nothing but the most serious of crafts. I don't see that changing and until it does, I don't see them winning in the end.

It's not just a Muslim thing. People in America are guilty of this type of sloth too. We recently had an oil spill in the San Francisco bay. It's pretty serious and many experts say that there will be environmental effects for the next 30 years. That's bad. But seriously, what do you expect? Shipping is important to commerce and San Francisco runs on commerce. This is the risk you run. But that's not what pisses me off. Tons of volunteers have been inundating the beach to help clean up the spill. They do this out of goodwill but none of them have any hazmat training. I'm not familiar with ship fuel but I know that jet fuel is extremely poisonous. I can't imagine that ship fuel is much different. Okay-- these folks are welcome to help but they shouldn't expect any tax dollars to help with their medical bills if they get sick. And on top of that, they may simply get in the way. If they were truly concerned about something like this, they would have gone to haxmat training long before something like this happened. It's just self-absorption that drive most of these people now. They talk about incompetence but how would they know. What do they know about cleaning up hazardous materials?

I ran into this same problem after 9/11. I was at Ground Zero but I had the training to be there. We had to turn away hundreds of people who were furious. They were frustrated and felt the need to so something. But we simply couldn't use them. Especially in a situation like that were people could have gotten hurt. Basically, if you're not trained and don't know how to folow orders, you just get in the way. It may go slowly but that's because there are too few professionals for that kind of work. Think abut that the next time you have to pay taxes.

Bottom line, you don't have a right to help just because ou want to help. You are either useful or ou are not. It has nothing to do with intentions. In the real world of emergencies, intentions count for next to nothing. And good intentions often do more damage than indifference.