Situational Awareness for the Focus Challenged Prepper
Source: The Prepper Journal
Many of you reading this now have at least a vague concept of Situational Awareness. For those who don’t, Situational Awareness means slightly different things based upon who you ask, but the general concepts are the same. Situational Awareness is an understanding of your environment and any potential threats to your safety or the safety of others in your group. Even more simply put, it’s making sure you know what is going on around you at all times.
Threat Levels
The threat levels below are courtesy of Jeff Cooper. Mr. Copper is known as the father of modern handgun technique. Mr. Cooper developed 4 levels of situational awareness commonly known as the Cooper Color Code.
White – Unaware and unprepared
Condition White or threat level white is the lowest we have in terms of urgency. Condition White means everything is OK and you don’t have anything to worry about. It is often used to describe people who seem oblivious to our current economic peril or the intrusiveness of government. When someone is looking at things from a Condition White standpoint, they think nothing is wrong and there is no cause for alarm. Move along folks, nothing to see here. This is also the level most people are in for vegging around the house watching a movie.
Yellow – Relaxed alert
Condition Yellow is a more proactive approach to the possibility of danger. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad will happen, but awareness is elevated and a more defensive posture has to be assumed in order to be ready for any potential threat. You can stay in a Condition Yellow for a long time without becoming fatigued. This is easily translated to being very attentive while driving for example. You are alert, but not freaked out and can readily anticipate the actions of the other drivers ahead of you.
Orange – Specific alert
In a condition orange your radar is up and you are prepared for something to happen. If you have ever been in a situation and watched two people right before a fight you know what this is. You are aware that you may have to take action at any moment.
Red – Fight
Condition Red means an attack is imminent. You have either knowledge of or can visually see a threat approaching and must prepare to act. This is when the trigger gets pulled.
How do we begin to put these concepts into action in our lives? All of us are constantly engaged in various levels of situational awareness most of our waking day. From the moment you wake up, to the time you finally drift off to sleep you are paying various degrees of attention to what is going on in your surroundings. This concept applies primarily to your immediate vicinity, but could also be expanded to your city, region, state, country and now with the threat of Korea, the world. For most of this article, I am going to focus on your immediate environment because I see the greatest capacity for immediate harm to you and your group by losing sight of what is going to impact you with the most urgency.
For your immediate Situational Awareness we have to start with you and what you are paying attention to. How distracted are you at any given moment? There are funny examples and more deadly examples of how something bad could have been averted if people were simply paying attention.
Cultural Liabilities
We lead very distracted lives now. If you don’t believe me, you are either in total denial or are living very far away from the rest of us. We have 24 hour news, movies that we can download and stream to our phones, smartphones with applications that require constant attention and a never-ceasing craving for information or stimuli for various reasons and rationale. Everyone has to update their Twitter or Facebook status, share photos with their friends and play games. This leads to people commenting on the most mundane minutia in life just to have something to say and focusing more on their phones than the world around them. If you have children of a certain age, they are probably involved in at least two weekly extracurricular activities which they need to be driven to and require practice usually with a DVD to keep them pacified. Advertisements bombard us in every conceivable place vying for our attention.
The social norm is to “be connected” but there seems to be in my mind, less actual connection with anyone. Just go out to any place and watch a group of kids interacting for any amount of time and I would bet $50 that there won’t be a 5 minute time span when one or more of them isn’t staring at their phone. This doesn’t only apply to kids; adults now are just as bad. I go out to dinner with people I work with or friends and the phones all come out.
More and more people I see are listening to music also with big headphones everywhere. They can be in an airport, walking down the street or even in their car. I love music as much as the next person, but how aware of what is going on around you can you be if you are thumping music really loud into your headphones? How can you see any threats coming if you are staring at your phone?
