Enmity and Emergency Management
Enmity is a word that goes back to biblical times (Genesis[1], sūrat l-baqarah[2], Bereshis[3]) – a very strong version of hate. Lucky for Emergency Management, it is not in our lexicon.
Enmity means intense hostility. If you're a football fanatic, you feel enmity for your opposing team.
Enmity comes from the same Latin root as enemy, and means the state of being an enemy. If you have always hated someone, you have a history of enmity with that person. Enmity is stronger than antagonism or animosity, which imply competitive feeling but don't go all the way to enemy status. Hopefully you are a peacemaker and don't experience too much enmity in your life.[4]
I think about this word whenever I watch the protests turning into civil unrest on college campuses – many of whom have both Emergency Management departments and offer Emergency Management degrees – and see physical violence, threats, intimidation and worse.
All for the cause of enmity.
We should consider ourselves lucky in professional Emergency Management – ours is a field where we succeed and prosper by being kind to strangers. We focus on Life Safety, Incident Stabilization, Property/Asset Protection, Environmental/Economic Restoration and Recovery/Resiliency in the long-term[5]. That is our dogma. I am fascinated (and truly perplexed) when I see university officials superseding these priorities, as well as undermining cooperation, coordination, collaboration, and communication with the emergency management officials in the jurisdictions where they reside. Last I checked, a college campus was not an embassy or a consulate of a foreign nation. A quick glance at the EMAP list of accredited colleges/universities, and I did find a few who had (hopefully) peaceful protests on their campuses. If I were an EMAP evaluator, I would consider how these incidents were handled on said campuses, to be an important factor: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The EMAP program is one way to adjudicate the professionalism of an organization’s Emergency Management program – and decisions by that organization’s leadership to embrace humanity, kindness, and peacefulness is ultimately their responsibility and accountability.
And enmity has no place in EM.
June 2024 News from the CEMIR
The CEMIR has is Substack, but we are going to keep providing highlights here on the EMN, to promote Emergency Management Intelligence.
Highlights for June 2024 - what the CEMIR is working on
Continuing our research and advocacy work on issues with infant and toddler feeding during disasters in the United States. We participated as observers (not evaluators – EMN subscribers: learn more about this at “The Policy Group” paid section, soon) in the National Mass Care Exercise which was held in May, 2024. Learn more about this mass care project work, over at Barton Dunant’s site.
Mike’s book Emergency Management Threats and Hazards: Water is in pre-production (being typeset and formatted at the publisher) and is slated for release this September. The book will be available for pre-order on August 20, 2024. You can also find it now on Amazon!
We started exploring the May 2024 police shooting of a 14-year-old student in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. At the time, he was armed with what appeared to be a rifle, but the post-incident investigation indicated it was a pellet gun. This is part of our substack series/section for K12 Schools and Pre-K/Daycare Center sites.
You can find FREE exercise templates (which are aligned with HSEEP standards) at Barton Dunant’s exercise training store, at https://blog.bartondunant.com/ets/. They are building out a series specifically designed for collaboration between public safety groups and K12 schools.
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The CEMIR is now directly on its own SubStack.
[1] English Standard Version Bible, 2009, Genesis 3:15
[2] Quranic Arabic Corpus Chapter 2, Verse 2:36 - https://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=2&verse=36
[3] Orthodox Jewish Bible, “eivah”, Bereshis 3:15 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%203%3A15%2CBereshis%203%3A15&version=ESV;OJB
[4] Vocabulary.com
[5] https://domesticpreparedness.com/articles/key-bridge-collapse-unity-of-effort