FREEDOM — Our Greatest Strength is turning into our greatest weakness

Almost two decades ago, I spent two years post-military service working on what was at that time a new government-funded program. Its goal was to prepare large metropolitan areas of the US to medically mitigate a chemical, biological, radiological, or environmental (CBRE) event which would cause mass casualties. This program is known as the MMRS or Metropolitan Medical Response System.

During my tenure with the MMRS, part of my duties required me to attend every one of our planning or working group committee meetings. These 11 workgroups were formed to think through and develop extensive mass casualty response plans, which we would then test with a local mock disaster exercise similar to TOPOFF Exercises.

Having participated in many of these local exercises and also being briefed on national exercises, I can tell you that it is impossible to be completely prepared to deal with mass casualty events where there are thousands of people involved, much less one that involves hundreds of thousands or millions of people like the COVID-19 pandemic. Being exposed to the disaster planning world many years ago has given me ample time to really deeply consider the implications of a mass casualty pandemic like COVID-19, and it is heartbreaking.

Today is a day of reckoning for us, our families, our country, and the world, but from what I can see, people are not taking this as seriously as they should. I see couples going to the grocery store together. I see whole families trapesing across hardware store parking lots going inside. Then there are mass gatherings of college students on public beaches in Florida. It’s our “Freedom” at its worst.

Is it because we’re not seeing social media posts of people all alone without family around giving their own eulogies before they suffocate from pneumonia lying on their cot inside a makeshift hospital that used to be a hotel (it’s coming)? Is it because they don’t know a family member that’s died from COVID-19 (it’s coming)? I don’t know, but all in all, right now, people need to start taking this WAY more seriously then they are.

You are an irresponsible steward of the Freedom that tens of thousands have sacrificed their lives for to continue to live your life as you did just a couple of weeks ago. It is your civic, patriotic duty to heed the warnings that you are being inundated with and to seriously think about your behaviors that can and need to be altered to save lives….perhaps even your own.