After Thursday’s discussion, I thought and though about how security threats, although they are the most common type of threats, they are definitely not the only ones that presents a risk. Countries have economic threats such as recessions, political threats, and specially, social threats. I’d like to highlight two main points regarding social threats: incentives and normalization, in order to further my explanation of the discussion.
In regards to the first point, I think incentives, but more specifically self-interests within incentives, are a main reason why countries like the United States enact certain policies. For example, Wyatt mentioned suing and how people living in the United States sue for everything because of their materialistic desires. However, back home, even though we have been in an economic recession for the past twelve years, the counts of suing for money have decreased greatly, presenting a rise in suing for information. Puerto Rico has a very disclosed policy on information accessibility and it dates back to the Spanish colonialist era in the island (which I talked about in my blog post on “The Double Effect”.) The count for informational lawsuits has increased even more after Hurricane María, due to the high demand for details on why the government kept the resources donated to the island, where the money donated and paid in taxes went, what happened to their family members, why the power in their municipality has not been restored even a year after the hurricane, etc. In the past months executive director of the Institute of Statistics of Puerto Rico and Executive Director of Open Spaces convened to create a bill in which a new information policy was proposed, a policy in which the information regarding the death causes and resolutions of an epidemiological study conducted by the Institute of Statistics would be accessible to the public. The bill initially passed, 48-2 favoring, and people celebrated that they would finally get the answers they had asked for. Nonetheless, a week after it was enacted, the government issued a statement saying that the new information policy had to be retracted because “the information should be reserved to those making the decisions.” Why would the government do this then? Interests. The information reserved, which is apparently deemed as classified as the Vatican documents, maintains direct contact and has an inevitable effect on the voters’ choice. The majority of the deaths were due to the local government’s negligence acts against the people and they recognize that voters will shift their vote if they feel like the political party for whom they are voting is targeting them. This then creates an effect that is standing in the way of the governor and his party’s self-interest. The closed information policy, then, is its only mechanism of defense, but if you need a mechanism of defense, then you face a threat. The reading discussed the social threats of foreign brides, how they are perceived as either passive victims or materialist gold diggers in Asia-Pacific countries and how a threat such as this one is nearly impossible to eliminate. This then led me to ask myself, is anything classified as a social threat nearly impossible to eliminate? The makeshift solution to the foreign brides issue was a reverse psychology attempt involving over emphasizing the topic in order to make citizens uncomfortable by the topic, furthering prevention. The magazine advertisements shaming “fast food” marriages when talking about long lasting marriages evidences this. But, without command and control action on behalf of the government, are social threats able to be solved? The case of Puerto Rico works along the same line of thought; the government recognizes that their votes in the polls will go down once the public knows the truth about their response to hurricane María so they have to enact a policy that restrains this information, but the social threat of lack of information and its effects is still not eliminated. I guess my blog post does not really propose a solution, given that I myself cannot find the answer to the question, without command and control, how can social threats be solved? Do we just live with them and keep talking about them until they are normalized and forgotten? This then brings me to my second point: normalization. The foreign brides issue reached its peak during the beginning of this past decade, making governments even more aware and prone to talk action. Nonetheless, even though this is a major issue for the government, society does not emphasize much on this issue. According to the reading, the matchmaking companies take even more advantage of the issue and increase and expand the Bachelor-Bachelorette approach. This does not take away the fact that it was perceived as a social threat during its peak and that it sparked a period of social crisis during the time, but now that society has normalized the foreign brides issue, it is taken advantage of. This was a somewhat effective response to the issue given that it is not perceived as high a social threat as it had been previously, although “somewhat” because it has not eliminated the threat. Could, then, normalization be the solution to social threats without the need of command and control action on behalf of the government?
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