Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Nope.

I do not think anyone or any country can be completely one hundred percent secure because you never can know how to secure yourself from every threat imaginable.  Or unimaginable.  Instead, you can be more secure or less secure; there are different levels of security.  However, this applies when you consider security a fact.  In class on Tuesday, there was some discussion on security as possibly being a perspective and if you perceive yourself or your nation as being secure, than you are.  I do not think this can be the meaning of security.  For example, if you asked people on the streets of New York City how secure they felt the nation was 10 minutes before the planes hit the World Trade Centers and 10 minutes afterwards, you would get very different answers.  And it is evident that the first perspective was incorrect.  Security is not a mind set, but the true level of security you are at cannot be absolutely determined until after that moment.  So, when we assess current security, it is more of a hypothesis than a fact.  The truth of the matter is that the instability of a measure of security inherently makes security unknowable until you look back on that particular instance.  Now that I think of it, even though I would say there are levels of security, it is near impossible to quantify security.  I suppose you could compare different situations to determine which one was more secure, but then you could not consider all the threats imaginable, or even compare the perceived threats of the times.  I have totally confused myself, but what I mean to say is that knowing how secure you are, or your nation is, is impossible.   

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