July 20, 2011

There were 3 posts published on July 20, 2011 (this is page 1 of 1).

CERT training

Tonight was my first night of CERT training. CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team and it’s a free program designed to get people trained to help their neighborhood in the event of an emergency.

Tonight’s topics were disaster preparedness and CERT organization. The next class will go over fire safety and disaster psychology. There will be other fun things to do as well.

Being in tonight’s class convinced me that I already know a lot of this stuff, having helped out in disaster events before. I know I still have more to learn, though, and I’m looking forward to improving my knowledge.

Tonight’s class also reminded me that I still have to blog about the lessons I learned from the April 16th tornado. There are plenty of ways the response could’ve been improved and I made notes of this immediately afterward but never shared them. That’s a blog post for another night, though, folks!

Gerrymandering

The problem with gerrymandering (no matter who does it) is that it makes it impossible to vote for leaders solely on the basis of who has the best solutions to our common problems. The goal should not be “how can we remain in office?” Instead, the goal should be “how can we find the best solutions to our problems?” If one team has a better idea of how things should be done let’s put that team up for an honest vote, not a vote that’s a foregone conclusion. We voters aren’t stupid – why shouldn’t we be trusted? Why are politicians afraid of giving us a fair choice?

I guess I’m old-fashioned, but the partisanship-at-all-costs stuff got old a long, long time ago.