Be Your Own First-Responder

Despite what authorities and the media might say, you are the first-responder to your life; and you are capable of profound problem-solving.

April 10, 2023

B​y: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

I offer some ideas, solutions, and tactics that work for some people.  Becoming an expat and entrepreneur have been the two biggest choices to contribute to my own aspirations toward freedom.  But what is freedom beyond the dictionary definition?

Freedom is a lot of things. Politically or legally people hearken to a Constitution or set of laws that define what that is. In literature, it’s captured in various metaphors and analogies. It’s a concept that is both a very particular thing, but with infinite iterations and expressions.

Perhaps the best way to describe freedom is everything other than what it is not.

F​or example, if I said “dependent” no one would associate that with “freedom”. Independent, on the other hand, is more closely associated with freedom.

Societies have normalized the insertion of government or authorities in general into nearly every aspect of their lives. They see each aspect in a vacuum, but then wonder why it all comes together in some dystopian way.

Police really aren’t needed for traffic violations. They might be needed to take a report and help clear away an actual accident, but not as hall monitors writing citations. They cannot, will not, and do not catch the majority of infractions, and people still manage to get to where they are going.

But if you talk to the average person, they talk about police like they talk about taxes: THEY don’t need a ticket and THEY don’t want to pay taxes, but police and taxes are still needed for everyone else.

Licenses aren’t really helpful either. Everyone who got divorced, got a marriage license and clearly failed at it. They don’t mean anything. Anthony Fauci has degrees and credentials and licenses oozing out of his ears, and what good was that?

Every purveyor of food that has had a recall on their items, had a license to take it to market.

Every drug that has been recalled for its destructive side effects has gotten the FDA’s stamp of approval.

People have even hyped up the “first-responder”. When you hear “first-responder” who do you think of? The victim or the authorities? Technically the first-responder to a crime is the victim. If someone broke into my house, my response is the first response. But the victims of real crimes are often the afterthought to the heroic actions of the authorities in most stories.

I​t’s off-putting that victims are given very little credit while authorities get the spotlight, in general. But I also see that as a larger scheme. Every libertarian knows what the response to “taxation is theft” is: “WhAt AbOuT tHe RoOoOoOoAdzZz?”

W​hat about the roads? The same tradesmen who build them now, would still build them and repair them. It’s not like the trade disappears with the taxes. But people cannot conceive of another way.

A much more significant policy would be gun control. Only authorities should have weapons of self-defense? That’s a historically preposterous idea.

Look at the history of prohibition. More people died from the enforcement of those laws than anyone did from the thing they were prohibiting.

People defend taxes. They defend gun control and prohibition policies. That’s a huge indication that people are losing their sense of self-sufficiency and self-governance.

People have allowed themselves to be regulated out of solving their own problems. That’s not okay.

I remember when parents would teach their kids to defend themselves and others against bullies. Now you have to run and tell an authority and wait?

I remember when parents taught their kids what to do in the event of a fire or home invasion. Now it’s just call 911, record it on your phone, and wait?

I remember when parents taught their kids to save for the inevitable rainy day. Now we just fill out government forms and have them bridge the gap?

Losing sight of the individual hero, the everyday hero, is a tyrannical conquest no one sees, but is antithetical to freedom.  The message is: You can’t get through anything without the authorities.

You need THE authorities? I don’t know if that’s as true as people make it out to be. “The” entails that there is only ONE source of authority.  THE experts suggests that there are a particular pool of them. And we all know you aren’t the one to decide who or what that is. 

There are “authorities” on various subjects. Many of whom don’t agree with one another despite their bone fides. Which one will you listen to?

Experts exist in various schools of thought and disciplines. The last three years demonstrated the authorities don’t think the hoi polloi are capable of deciding for themselves who or what to listen to.

T​rust the experts? Trust the Science? We apparently have “experts” running the Federal Reserve which makes me think the inflation we have now is more deliberate than accidental.

You might trust someone. You might follow their advice. You might like the ideas of those who have studied and dabbled in a certain space of thought for a while. And all that might very well have culminated into a success for you. That’s exactly as it should be. You decide the experts you wish to trust, if at all.

W​e are each here cherry-picking what works for us and what doesn’t. We are each solving for different problems under different circumstances. We are not just clones of one another. We process the world differently, we need ideas and solutions that we can adapt into our own psychological ecosystem or it won’t work.

Diversity isn’t forced integration. Diversity is recognizing when each individual need closeness and when we need distance in order to get through this thing called life.

T​he world is a huge buffet of ideas. We need freedom to access them, test them out, and see what fits. Armed with just that, we are far more capable of solving for life’s problems than any “authority”.

I​’m going to leave you with this video because you need to see the whole picture of what people are truly capable of. When no one is looking, and they aren’t posing for pictures and the news, we are actually quite incredible. And we need to remember that.