PERSONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Perry Gamsby

Enjoy the blog posts here. They are an eclectic collection of opinions, events, experiences and sadly a few tragedies. All are true and have happened to someone, somewhere. Just about all of them were avoidable.  Visit every page on the site but come back here regularly as there will always be something new to read and hopefully learn from. Remember, few things in life are ever actually fatal.

A recent report from the UK of a man taking his dead mum home on a 50km bus trip has made me think about what to do when someone dies. I have a cousin who is handicapped after suffering viral meningitis as a boy. Until recently he lived with my aunty, now 92 and in a home. He is 64. I can imagine him just wanting to get her home and then asking for help from the neighbours. He would be confused and very defensive… who wouldn’t?

Death has no timetable or appointment schedule. when it comes, it comes. Do you know what to do if a loved one passes away? Who do you call? What do you do first? As a former Military Policeman my first thought is to protect the scene as it may be a crime scene. In the case of an elderly relative passing away peacefully in their sleep this is not an issue but what if you were to come across them lying on the floor in a pool of blood?

First you check for vital signs and give first aid but if they are not responding, consider you may be standing in a crime scene. Forget the CSI TV hype, real forensic scenes of crime investigators don’t carry on like on TV, nor do they have the time to. Try not to spoil the scene or move too many things. Obviously giving first aid will change things but it will be clear to the SOCE officer that you did what you tell them you did, the evidence will support your story.

Once all that is in hand, police and ambulance called and so on, then what? Do you know what to do next? Are you an executor of the estate? Start thinking now about the unthinkable. What if it was a child or spouse of yours? What if it were you, would your loved ones know what to do?

A bookcase that becomes a coffin, I want one!

I read with sadness and anger that another teenager had committed suicide due to being bullied. This included ‘cyber bullying‘ and the report made a big deal about how the bullying never stopped. When the girl got home it was there on her social network page. OK, this is where it gets a little hard for me to follow. If the bullying was going on online… why not close the account? Why not change name and password? Why not simply stop going online? Sooner or later the bully would get the hint and lose interest.

I am sorry, it is a tragedy for sure but the biggest tragedy has to be that the girl valued her social network more than her life. She would rather kill herself than go without her Facebook or whichever social network it was. This is ridiculous! Don’t blame the social network or the internet, don’t even blame the bully. If the bully intended her to kill herself, then charge him and take him through the courts. If the bully was just another mental midget, troubled teen with issues, then that is sad but the choice to end it all was hers, nobody else’s.

Which makes me think that some people are predisposed to dealing with stress and pressure that way, rather than fight back, confront the bullies or simply switch off the computer. It is sad, no argument but I think we need to keep things in perspective and not get too wound up, too ‘you poor thing’. We are tending to get softer and softer as we conquer more and more of the every day risks life has for us. We will never totally eradicate all risk and that is a good thing because danger is the best instructor there is.

If there is one thing that really twists my Wa it is ignorant bleeding civilians who haven’t a clue about anything military except the rubbish they get off the glass toilet. Media types loosely calling themselves journalists are the worst. I despise them when they call every sword or long knife used to scare or skin, a ‘samurai sword,’ as if it is the only sword ever made. Most idiots who wield swords nowadays don’t use ‘samurai’ swords, or even anything remotely Japanese, but who cares when ‘samurai’ and ‘ninja’ are so emotive?

The same for AK47 assault rifles. The Kalashnikov AK47 hasn’t been made for decades, not since AKMs and AK74s and a whole range of other newer models hit the streets. Worse is when they call it an M47 or an AK16 and mix it with the US weapon, derived from the Armalite AR15 (and now called an M4, a derivative of the M16A2). It gets worse with AFVs, or armoured fighting vehicles. If it has tracks it is a tank. If it is big and armoured it is a tank. Not an armoured car or an APC, armoured personnel carrier, tracked load carrier, self propelled gun or any one of a plethora of AFVs. No, it is a tank.

Even more ludicrous is the slant the media seem to give a story by using the word ‘military’. When they relate how something happened with ‘military precision’ it is obvious they were never in the military. I was and believe me, most of the time things got cocked up and we had to muddle through as best we could, regardless. This story made me cringe, too. For some reason a ‘military knife’ is sharper and far more deadly than the 8 inch cook’s knife most commonly used to murder and maim. Following that, cheap Stanley knives (razor knives) and screwdrivers tend to get used far more often than purpose designed ‘fighting knives’. But really, they used a ‘military knife’? So what? The victim shouldn’t have gotten out of the car and as there were two coming at him, why didn’t the driver get out sooner? We can second guess this incident to death but the fact remains, the type of knife is irrelevant compared to the fact the knifer had the intent to use it, and use it he did, repeatedly.

I mean what are we supposed to infer from this? That because they use the words ‘military style’, the knife was more dangerous? That the user was more determined? What? I had three knives issued to me when I was in the army. The biggest was a machete. Then there was my bayonet and the edge on that would barely part butter, as in there wasn’t one and if you tried to put one on it you would be charged for damaging government property. The other knife was a ‘Knife, Pocket Clasp, with lanyard’. It had a deer foot blade (meaning not pointy at all), a vicious tin/bottle opener and a marlin spike for getting young Diggers out of the tracks of APCs and it was on a lanyard so you wouldn’t lose it. Fight with it? Not while I had any ammo left for my L1A1 SLR (Google it). Failing that, if it came down to fighting with a military knife I think using the rifle’s butt or an entrenching tool would have been more effective, I was in the Engineers and later the Military Police, not the bloody Gurkhas!

The thing is, the type of weapon (or the lack of one) is irrelevant. Deadly is deadly. It makes no difference that the inland taipan can kill 40,000 mice with one dose of venom and the coastal taipan can barely manage 20,000 mice. That is still a lot of dead rodents and dead is dead, afterall. What counts every time is the intent. The intent of the attacker to drive home their attack and the intent of the victim to defend themselves or not. Usually the most aggressive person wins. If that person is bigger, more numerous and or armed, then the odds are in their favour even more. Intent is everything, believe me. I should know, I used to have a military knife, remember?

This woman certainly can’t. She was disfigured for life in a 2004 meth lab explosion and she was recently found right back at it, cooking methamphetamine in her trailer. The meth cooking process is extremely dangerous and claims many lives and hundreds of homes every year. The chemicals and process used in making meth is volatile and dangerous at the best of times in proper facilities, doing it in the kitchen with home made equipment is a recipe for disaster.

So why do they do it? The answer is money. It is easier to make meth and sell it as crack than to get a job and work hard. In the USA where someone like her with not education would be making $2.75 an hour as a waitress plus tips (and the IRS presume you will make $X an hour in tips and tax you regardless) or less than $8 an hour minimum wage in other industries it is often worth the risk. America carries on about communism and socialism and what have you, yet unless you are making $250K a  year some experts say there is little value voting Republican. Make no mistake, the land of milk and hollywood is one tough place to make it in. If you keep your head above water it can be a wonderful place to live your life in. But if you have some bad luck and fall through the cracks, then you are doomed.

The middle class is scared stiff of becoming poor and it is no wonder. They are the tool of the rich, keeping the economy going with their consumerism in response to the conditioning of Madison Avenue on behalf of the Wall Street 1%. Will Rogers said back in the Great Depression that alone out of all the people in the world, only Americans would drive to the poor house. Poor takes on a different meaning in a developed nation like the USA and while you should make no mistake there are some 30% or more of the population considered officially poor, they do have it better than the poor of a third world country. It is relative after all.

Part of the affect of poverty is the poorer nutrition that contributes to lower average IQ levels. Garbage in, garbage out and if the baby and child don;t get the nutrition they need, their brains are not going to develop to their full potential. Then there are other factors like the school boards being partly funded by property taxes so if the district is full of slums, there won’t be as much funding as there will be in a more upscale area. But then this is the user pay capitalist way. Let’s not even start on health care. If anything, the amazing thing is how many Americans manage and even thrive. How many people, despite the draconian laws and political motivation behind so much they mislabel as ‘justice’, the one sided bias towards the haves at the expense of the have nots and the societal shame placed on those less fortunate through cultural mores that are no longer present in other western societies, manage to stay alive and well and keep consuming and using their credit and keeping the dream alive, albeit a dream that sees the top few percent enjoy by far the majority of the wealth and prosperity of the world’s richest nation. Personally, the vast majority of Americans I have known through my military service and as an expat overseas have been brave as lions and generous to a fault. Particularly when you are on their turf in the USA, they are some of the most hospitable people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. I like and respect Americans and love vacationing there, I just would not want to live in the place.

While this is all going on, many just take the initially easier road and turn to crime. Violent crime is rife but so too fraud in various forms and larceny. Desperate people do desperate things and the system is such that it is easy to become desperate in the US of A. We here in Australia can learn from this because we follow the USA more or less, sooner or later. We need to be selectively tough on criminals and selectively compassionate, too. Not hammer everyone into the ground for a mistake usually caused by a circumstance change beyond their ability to control or manage. Not give them the keys to the candy store and pay for dental check ups while apologising for rotting their teeth. No, a happy medium needs to be struck.

Keep in mind not everyone is as smart as you and even if you are just average, with an IQ of 96-98 for Australians and Americans, there are plenty who are dumber than you and many of those end up in prison. Being dumb is not a crime but too often it leads to a life of it. If we are smart enough to know better and keep out of trouble we should spare a thought for those too dumb to know better and try not to judge them. Don;t trust them, but don’t tread on them and make it any harder for them either. By all means give them a fair go if you can, but don’t turn you back at the same time. Maybe in time they will realise that they don’t have to exploit everyone who isn’t busy kicking the crap out of them. Maybe they will learn to trust society and society can lower its guard and trust them. Maybe.

The recent QANTAS grounding is just one event in many that show how the rich 1% are totally disconnected from the 99% of the rest of us. Alan Joyce is a classic example in my eyes. I have no idea why QANTAS needed to hire a foreigner to head our national airline. There is an old Irish saying; ‘If you are going on a journey,never take an idiot with you, you’ll always find one when you get there’. I’m not saying Joyce is an idiot, far from it. He is, however, totally out of touch with the reality that is our lives. I believe the last time he worked in Australia was for another airline, Ansett and that went out of business around that time! He is a hatchet man, brought in because he is not Australian, doesn’t have to live here and can always scuttle off somewhere else with his golden parachute once he has done the dirty work needed to make a few rich people richer. The same thing happened with that other former public entity, Telstra and the yank Trujillo. No connection to Australia, do the dirty deeds and disappear. Surely we have an Australian citizen as able as this bloke?

He was paid $3.8 million a year to be the CEO. A disgusting amount of money when you think how half of that could make a huge difference to many old age pensioners, or anyone on a low income for that matter. Then during the worst period of industrial disputes in the airline’s history, he gets a $1.7 million pay rise! The very next day he strands 68,000 people around the world and blames it on the unions. He makes all sorts of mouth noises about being forced to do this or suffer a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as industrial action would otherwise drag on but the truth is he had other options. I think pilots are paid too much and so too many of the staff of QANTAS but then they would disagree and fair enough. I definitely think CEOs and politicians are paid too much, too. Look at the woman in charge of Westpac Bank. She used to be the boss of St George Bank, then switched banks right before the new employer bought out her old one. And of course we are expected to believe she knew nothing about it, didn’t bring over any confidential info to help the buyout and so on. Then, like all the big banks they make phenomenal profits at our expense and still have to sack people and take jobs offshore as well as refuse to lower interest rates because of the cost of money or whatever! The truth is it is all about the dividend to the share holder and they hold a lot of shares themselves, these CEOs. They don’t care about lost jobs, they think people can just get another one right away but they can’t. These people, the disconnected 1% are different to you and me in many ways. Not necessarily smarter or more hardworking but definitely more focused and ruthless and without a care for anyone but themselves. They are a form of corporate sociopath.

The problem lies in the mindset these huge salaries help create. If I was making $150,000 a year I would not worry about being ripped off at the petrol pump for ten cents or more a litre for my imported, luxury vehicle. A few years ago when the AUD$ was worth US$0.70 and oil was US$150 a barrel we were paying up to $1.50 a litre. Today the Aus dollar is worth the same or more than the US$, oil is US$90 a barrel and we are still getting stiffed up to $1.50 a litre except for a day or two a week when Woolworths, Coles and the big oil companies play footsie with us and drop it a few cents. The government will say nothing because they would lose billions in tax revenue. Instead they create an overpaid bureaucrat and give him a budget and cost us millions a year and he has done nothing to watchdog petrol prices like he is supposed to. He has probably watched them but that is all. He, like the politicians and the corporate executives are disconnected. Big Time.

The ‘Occupy’ movement is reminding them of this but they see it merely as a nuisance. The rest of us are being manipulated y the media into siding against the Occupy protestors because a few long hairs will agitate the protest beyond common sense and stir up the police and make good television with violence and so on. I support the Occupy concept, but I think once you have occupied and disrupted you have made your point, no need to give the other side any sympathy by overstaying your ‘unwelcome’.

Times are a’changing and we will see more and more civil disobedience as ordinary people, the 99%, finally have too much. The ignorance and arrogance of the 1% and those who suck at their teat will be their undoing. As we trend more and more towards fighting hot wars in smelly, remote places, we will find the new cold war will be an economic one and between  the haves and the rest of us who have not as much and never will, thanks to the haves owning everything, including the politicians we think we voted for to represent us. Mark and Engels will be laughing their beards off.

A 16 year old girl has been granted a court order that protects her from being forced to marry someone in Lebanon against her will. The arranged marriage, a custom still practised in some cultures, would quite simply be illegal (void) in Australia as it is without genuine consent of one of the partners. This of course is of no consequence to those who follow the practise. They would ship daughter off to wherever and have their will imposed upon her, often for the rest of her life. We in the west find it hard to understand their thinking, given how they usually profess their deep love for their daughter. The fact remains she has been rendered a chattel, a good or commodity to be bargained with and sold off to the highest bidder.

While the court may have refrained from condemning the practice, I won’t. At least not when they do it here in Australia because it is against our law. It is not a part of our culture and I find it abhorrent. What is just as bad is that these people come here for the good Australia can provide, but they refuse to leave their medieval, even pre-biblical era habits behind. They come here for the stability and prosperity our society offers compared to theirs and they then insist on doing the kind of things that contributes to making their society one worth leaving. Australian culture and society is not better than theirs, whoever ‘they’ might be in any instance. It is simply different. As we must accept their ways, in their country, they must accept and adhere to ours in this country.

I love to share my country, culture and the opportunities we have here with anyone who wants to come. But come here legally, not via the back door. Come here and adapt and adjust, don’t try to change us to suit you. Come here and FIFO as they say in the mining camps. Not Fly In Fly Out but ‘Fit In or F*^%! Off’. When I have lived in foreign countries I have had to adjust and adapt to assimilate. I have had to change my ways, my thinking, to fit in and that is how it should be! I chose to go there, nobody rendered me there in an orange jump suit with handcuffs and leg irons affixed!

The attitude that continues such an alien custom as arranged marriage also harbours other ideas that are out of sync with our culture. Attitudes towards women that are outdated (by our standards and those are the only ones we should judge by in our country) and very unhealthy. Attitudes that condone domestic violence and sexual assault because the male is the dominant partner in any male-female relationship or exchange. I’m sorry, that is not how we think and it is intolerable. Our women are an equal part of our society. We used to have some pretty misogynistic mindsets here (remember when every woman was a ‘Sheila’? What was really just a colloquial nickname had, for many, connotations of inferiority and today it is hardly ever heard and used only in an almost self-deprecating way and very carefully even then) but we have moved on. We have progressed, sa uncomfortable as that has been at times.

In a few years we will probably see women in frontline combat units and while that is something I disagree with, personally, it will send a message. I am not against women in combat because I don’t think they can fight but rather because of the effect they have on their male comrades. It has been proven, in combat, in Israel and elsewhere, that the male soldier will instinctively tend to try and protect his female comrade in arms more so than he would for a male. This takes his focus off the task at hand, of killing the enemy and weakens the unit’s effectiveness. Not her fault, it is the hard wiring in the male to blame. Of course, that was true in my day (1977 to 1986) but today’s generation of young Digger might be different. While they have proven in Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomons in recent years they are just as good as any of their forebears were, they will no doubt have their own idiosyncrasies compared to my era, as we did compared to those of soldiers who served before us. The thing is, if the ADF can’t control the natural and to be expected sexual shenanigans at the Defence Academy, how do they expect to handle them in the highly testosterone charged atmosphere of a bunker after a firefight? If the future leaders of the troops can’t be trusted when in training, how can they expect the other ranks to behave any differently?

Society is changing, the world is changing and it behooves all of us to keep up with the changes. If you change cultures and come and live in Australia, then leave the cultural practices alien to the new culture behind in the old, or go back there and stay where you are more comfortable.  This is not some right wing, nationalist rant, simply stating what to me makes perfect sense. I embrace diversity and welcome migrants, remember? Just so long as they come in the front door and behave like anyone would want someone to behave in their home. Not as a guest, but as a member of the family, respecting the other members of the family. When my family migrated to Australia, we had to adapt and assimilate. When I migrated to the Philippines in 2002, I had to do the same and when I brought my wife and children to Australia a few years later, they were the ones to have to adapt and assimilate. Hey, some people still eat dogs in the Philippines but there is no way my relatives would even begin to think of throwing our pooch on the barby, they know it is not how we do things here. We don’t arrange marriages either, or mutilate the genitals of women so they serve their husbands better or for why ever they do this crime; so leave those barbaric practices back where they are not barbaric, merely accepted as the norm.

Apologies for the painful pun but this is an amazing, true, story. This woman was minding her own business at her street stall in Mexico when she was struck down. She awoke in hospital to find a grenade was lodged in her mouth. The grenade was live and had failed to explode after leaving the launcher, probably an M203 or perhaps from one of the new generation M32 pump action weapons. Whatever it was from, it had stuck in her mouth and hadn’t gone off. A brave surgical team operated on her for four hours… in an open field. The poor woman will now have to live the rest of her life with the scars, both physical and emotional but at least she is alive.

Just when I thought I might feel sorry for myself for some, at the time earth shattering issue…. I read about Connie Culp. I no longer have any problems. This poor woman was shot in the face by her husband in 2004. He is now out of prison and on parole but so what? She faces (no pun intended) the rest of her life with a face transplant. She is grateful to be alive, grateful for the transplant and taking life one day at a time. That, ladies and gentlemen, is courage. Too often we forget that once the ambulance drives off and the CSI guys solve everything in the next 45 minutes plus commercial breaks (that is an intended pun) it isn’t over for the victims of the crime.

Connie Culp has endured pain, ridicule and no doubt a loss of self esteem we can’t begin to imagine. Yet she is still punching back. That is the survivor mentality you need to make it sometimes. Have you got it? Have I? I hope I never have to find out.

What goes around comes around and if you make a habit of breaking into people’s houses you have to expect the odd home owner to take umbrage. In Sydney today a man was stabbed by the home owner after he bailed him up in his own home with a stun gun. There have been a spate of assaults and robberies with stun guns of late, this might quieten things down a tad. I know I am in no shape at the moment to wrestle with anyone, let alone a young, fit criminal armed with a stun gun. I would prefer to reach for a stick but if the knife was handy, so be it. Bottom line, don’t brreak the law and you have no reason to complain. Or die. No doubt this young thug will turn out to be a much loved, beautiful young boy with his life (of crime) ahead of him. Spare a thought for the homeowner, he nearly became a victim of crime. Now he might become a victim of the legal system.

Yesterday in Melbourne a pit bull savaged and killed a four year old girl as she clung, screaming and terrified, to her mother’s leg. As a parent and having five girls of my own ranging from nearly 2 to nearly 13 my heart goes out to Jaclin Apuk Awen, who fought the dog with her bare hands to try and save little Ayen Chol. My wife asked what could she do it it were her and I had to think hard. These pit bulls are not easy to kill, and make no mistake you would have to kill it to stop it. They are bred for one thing and that is killing and they lock on and never let go once they get a grip. They are savage beasts that have no place in civilized society. None whatsoever.

I told my wife that she would have to grab a back leg and lift the dog up and break the leg, I showed her how to snap it at the ankle joint or rip the knee from the hip, then crush the testicles if it is a male dog and then, if it lets go, smash it against the ground until it is dead. Of course, it takes strength to do this and the dog will not stand still. It will be a whirling dervish and you will get badly bitten but hopefully you will save your child. I said if you poked the eye as she suggested, you must insert your thumbs and pop the eyeball out but the dog will likely keep biting and tearing, even when blind. She said to choke it but they have such strong neck muscles so I said if it were me and I could drop my weight onto the neck I would but the dog will not be stationary, it will be moving and hard to pin down. This is what they are bred to do, albeit against other dogs.

My father taught me to grab the front legs and pull them apart and tear the dog’s heart but I would hesitate to put my face so close to the dog’s to get such a grip. If the opportunity presented itself, though, I would try that or, if I had a belt or shirt I could use to entangle the dog, or strangle it with, I would use that. I once fought off a pit bull like dog that attacked my own and all I could find to help was an empty soft drink can. I beat the dog with that but it would not let go. I tore the can in half and used the sharp edge against its throat, slicing and hacking, all the while my puppy screaming and the owner yelling at me not to hurt his dog. Too bad. The dog finally let go after I had slashed half its face off. The owner wanted to sue me once he realised he would lose if he tried to fight me, I made a terrible sight, covered with dog’s blood and still pumped with adrenalin from the fight. In the end he just walked away and I took my puppy home to clean his wounds.. and mine.

The owners of these dogs are too often gutless thugs with no brains who think by having such a ‘tough’ dog it makes them tough. It doesn’t and they don’t have the brains or the common sense to control the animal and be able to keep it under control all the time. Those people who believe they are sensible and reasonable and argue the case for having such dogs are little better than the thug owners, just more articulate. These fighting breeds are all about stroking the egos of men who otherwise have nothing else in their lives as civilization has passed them by. Certain ethnic groups get their kicks at illegal dog fights. Close by where I live they hold them on secluded semi-rural properties and the men who attend these fights are basically either evil or dumb or both. Some of these people even steal large dogs such as German Shepherds and Rottweilers to fight their Pit Bulls, Tosas and other fighting breeds.

I usually stand up against calls to ban anything, preferring to live and let live believing people can choose to take part or not. But these dogs have no purpose other than to kill and their owners have no right to hold that power over others unless we have the means to defend ourselves properly from them. Since we can’t carry handguns, that means the dogs must go. Every time a child is savaged or killed the call goes out and is ignored due to a lack of political guts. How many more children must we lose before our elected representatives take action? The law is not enough because it relies on the owners to control the dog and they can’t, won’t or simply  don’t. I know any dog, even our little poodle, can turn and savage, even kill, a child. But he isn’t built for killing nor is he bred for it and he is a lot easier to defend against than a pit bull. If you want these dogs for hunting then go live in the bush, there is nothing to hunt here. If you want a dog to guard your home, then buy and properly train a suitable animal with a balanced temperament. Oh, proper training requires time, energy, effort and often money. All too hard. Better to just swagger along with the dog and your tatts and your caveman attitude.