A senior executive at the Social Security Administration was physically dragged from his office this week after clashing with DOGE, according to The Washington Post.
Greg Pearre, a career civil servant who led an IT team working on the agency’s data systems, was removed over his opposition to a DOGE plan to cut off immigrants from key financial services, three people told the Post.
The scheme cooked up by Elon Musk’s DOGE squad falsely lists thousands of migrants as dead in a Social Security database known as the “death master file.”
Being entered into the death database cuts a person off from crucial financial services, like the ability to receive government benefits and access a bank account or credit card.
It might be because people don’t do well in a crisis and tend to seek out the normal. Like grabbing your luggage in a burning plane, or standing around in a medical situation. How to fix this? The immediate one is to have someone take charge and give instruction to others. For example in the medical example, you don’t ask for help, you point at people and give them a duty, like calling 9-1-1 or getting something to help the victim. They’ll do it, they just needed direction because their brain is stuck.
More importantly in this case, we need resistance and protesting to become a normal thing that people see and are exposed to. Then when they get into a situation where a reaction is needed, they’ll have something to fall back on what to do and how to act. For most people they’re still stuck in the “get back to normal” mode and hoping that things will get better if they just wait it out.
This is true. People are bad at crisis and it’s not something a set of skills you can easily practice. I do think some hobbies probably help- some stressful video games, some sports and sporting-like things like paintball- but on the whole a lot of people live pretty simple lives where the most surprising, stressful, thing to happen is they almost burned their microwave popcorn. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it leads to disappointing behavior
Not that most people would, but you can get training to this end. I remember Vsauce had a mindfield episode about the bystander effect and people’s willingness to stand up to injustice happening right in front of them. It stuck with me.
You’re absolutely right. It just sucks to think about and I like to think I’d be better in this situation. Won’t know until I am though.
No, it’s hard to train yourself for the unknown. I’m great in a crisis at work since I know things and have experience, and it’s actually where I’ve seen it in action. Coworkers without that expertise standing wondering what to do, they just need a direction and things get done. But could I do the same in a medical situation or a disaster, or in this case a political upheaval? I like to think so, but I don’t know.
You can’t train for the unknown, but you can give yourself the ability to organize and plan your way out of difficult situations by setting clearly definable and attainable goals.
Yes, and for generally anything this is a good idea. From fire drills to bad weather plans (mass shootings in the US, yay), know what to do and where to go. It’s just a bit surreal that we’re now having to talk about doing the same thing for government suppression acts and civil disturbance. But it’s here, apparently.
You know sometimes I forget that not everyone has hyper vigilance from PTSD