Posted by
This Guy on Friday, April 20, 2007 3:45:52 PM
Our country grieves today for the friends and family of the victims at Virginia Tech. Undoubtedly, a tragedy of this scale invites reflection and evaluation, and there will be continued debate for many weeks to come on how such a nightmare can be prevented in the future.
One of the many lessons to be learned from the atrocity at VT is this: Government can't protect us.
This isn't a new lesson, but it's one that many of our citizens seem to have forgotten, or one perhaps that they have failed to learn, even though the point gets illustrated daily.
At the scene every car accident, who is the first to arrive? Firefighters? Police? EMT? Nope. It's concerned citizens, compelled to help.
House on fire? Good neighbors will always beat the fire department.
Hurricane Katrina. No one argues that the government at any level, local, state, or federal, handled that well. Who bore the brunt of the burden, and supplied the most immediate aid? Churches. The community. Neighbors. Citizens.
Citizens will always be at the forefront of any crisis, because the government can't be everywhere all the time, no matter how big we make it. Maybe we should stop making laws that force citizens into government dependency. Maybe it'd make sense to start teaching our citizens how to take care of themselves, and just as importantly, how to take care of each other.