After a week of personal practice with resilience and recovery, the Diva is back in action. Almost back to normal. e.

From the Homeland Security Digital Library, this reference to a potentially useful site. See National Preparedness Toolkit.

A friend brought to my attention a message on preparedness that is 450 years old.  Here is an excerpt:

‘This is how the situation stood:  the government apparently had plenty of warning, but “all was kept very private”; then they acted “as if they had had no warning, no expectation, no apprehensions, and consequently the least provision imaginable was made for it ¡n a public way”.  Before the calamity struck, ‘the richer sort of people” were able to get out of town, so those who stayed behind were mainly the poor. To add insult to injury, “there were a great many robberies and wicked practices committed”. Afterwards, ‘sorrow and sadness sat upon every face…the voice of mourning was truly heard in the streets …it was enough to pierce the stoutest heart in the world to hear them”.

This account above did not appear in last week’s New Orleans Times-Picayune, or, for that matter, in any other account of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the US Gulf Coast on Aug 29. It was written in 1722, by Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year, about the epidemic that ravaged London in 1665. As recent events have shown, around three centuries later nothing much has changed.

…….

Source: Faith McLellan. The Lancet, Vol 366, pp968-969 (New York, Sept 17 2005). The full text of the Defoe pamphlet is at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm

Thanks to Ian McLean for sharing this with me.

The article is titled Why you Are in Denial About Disasters. But the bottom half of the article is worth reading for insights into matters of attitude and motivation.

Which brings me to my favorite picture of the week: talk about bad attitude! This is “Grumpy Cat,” and I appreciate his willingness to illustrate the article.