Survive The Potential Of Terrorism

By: Richard Bogath

Survive Terrorism

Standing on a crowded subway platform, you notice someone drop a black backpack on the ground and then quickly move away from it, dialing his cell phone.

Standing at a bus stop outside of a local busy police station, it comes to your attention that the white sedan across the street has been watching the front door of the station for ten minutes…with binoculars.

Shopping at your local Super-Mart, an individual has been talking out loud to himself, asking for forgiveness for and from something unseen. They continuously pick up and put down a hatchet in the camping section of the store.

In our busy, ever-distracted day to day existence of being “plugged in” and “tuned out”, do we really see what transpires around us? In the three examples above, would you have been one of those attentive enough to notice what was going on and that it was in any way out of the ordinary?

The unfortunate reality of the modern day potential of a terrorist attack serves the average person with only two choices to survive terrorism – to be prepared for an attack or to be a victim of one. While we cannot laden the responsibility of preparedness on each and every innocent victim by stating that they should have in any way “seen it coming”, we can, however, become more able to recognize potential signs of possible targets. Recognizing these signs will help keep us aware and more alert and even allow us to make better choices when we select our routes of travel and places to linger. It’s sometimes impossible to avoid people and no one is suggesting that you do so, but our level of attentiveness is the key to recognizing the potential for a terrorist threat.

It’s important to be mindful of the fact that terrorist attacks do not have to come only from middle-eastern men screaming “Allaju Akbar” while wielding an AK-47. Terrorism can just as easily be “home grown” and is just as influential to disturbed locals as it can be from radical states thousands of miles away.

So how do you stay alert to a potential target of a terrorist attack? How do you survive terrorism?

Isn’t it a lot of work to stay paranoid and take note of all that transpires around you? Sure. Ever hear the term “Better safe than sorry”? I would prefer to take a thirty-second glance of my surroundings—giving them my full and undistracted attention to identify anything that may look “iffy” to me. Just maybe a little something that’s out of place. I’m not looking for terrorists, mind you, as there are far more qualified people out there to hopefully accomplish that task. What I am looking for is what might be attractive to a terrorist or what might be so out of place that it sets me on edge.

It’s not hard to take notice of something that is dramatically wrong with a location. The abandoned backpack, a grungy car appearing one day and parked in the same place for days on end, someone acting erratically—all of these are cause to take notice but at the same time, none of them are absolute signs of terrorist activity. The point is—did you take notice.

Someone is taking photographs of a particular building. We’ve all done it and it can be completely harmless but at the same time—are different people photographing the same side of the same building day after day? Do you find it strange that there always seems to be someone out there taking a pic when the streets in front of the building are packed with commuters, or theater visitors, or schoolchildren?

The Terrorist Mantra

The terrorist mantra is not to damage infrastructure. They don’t want to interrupt fuel supplies or cut off waterways to major cities. They don’t care about how many tanks we have or F-16’s can take off in an hour. The terrorist wants to kill as many people as possible with as little effort and resistance as possible. The crowded marketplace or movie theater in an area with restrictive gun laws is a much more inviting target than a local restaurant full of concealed carry holders. Or, there is the psychological impact of killing as many high-value targets as possible like police or firefighters. These kinds of attacks create mistrust in the existing government because the feeling of vulnerability to the populace is greater when the police cant even protect themselves. Consider the following scenario…

Saturday afternoon at a popular suburban shopping mall is packed with people during a pre-holiday sale that is going on. Around lunchtime is the time when the most activity is occurring at the front entrance to the mall due to the face that people are moving in and out of the mall to have lunch out while shopping. The terrorist enters the mall and within seconds opens fire with a handgun or rifle and shoots into the air to make as much noise as possible.

The panic ensues and the terrorist drops the weapon, getting swept up in the frenzy to escape and allows himself to be swept outside with the crowd. He makes his way to his car just as a dozen police vehicles arrive at the mall entrance and that is when the terrorist activates the three car bombs placed strategically at the mall entrance, killing a large percentage of the officers and wounding anyone in the vicinity.

Sounds horrible, right? Sound impossible?

No, not impossible at all. The scenarios will vary, the variables endless…but where you are in the scenario is the important factor in surviving. It’s important to keep things in perspective in that you cannot go through life fearing what is around the next corner, but at the same time there is an extreme difference between extreme paranoia and being completely out of touch.

Live life and remember that you live in the greatest country in the world. Chances are that you will not encounter a terrorist activity but for God’s sake, wake up from the fog just in case you do. Take notice of the world around you instead of the blind, soft, warm womb of ignorance and the assumption that “it could never happen here”. It did. It can. It will.

You can learn to survive terrorism by taking notice of the world around you.

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