The title is a program developed by the National Rifle Association. Here’s part of the introduction from their website: “Experts agree that the single most important step toward ensuring your personal safety is making the decision to refuse to be a victim. That means that you must have an overall personal safety strategy in place before you need it. Through a three to four hour seminar…you can learn the personal safety tips and techniques you need to avoid dangerous situations and avoid becoming a victim.”

This sounds like it would be a good program to attend. In fact, a couple friends of mine became certified to teach the program and offered to do so for anyone interested in attending the class. They put some notices up where they work (being careful not to obscure some other notices of an upcoming red cross blood drive) and started preparing for their seminar. Today, the human resources department removed all the notices for both the Refuse To Be A Victim program and the blood drive, stating that there was no written procedure in place to post notices.

I have a name for that non-procedure. It’s called bullshit. What the human resources people did was attempt to keep the employees in the condition of victims rather than allow them to gain some knowledge about self-protection. I suppose that was a typical response from anyone in human resources, a department generally made up of politically correct sheep, though I wouldn’t have expected it in this particular company.

Hopefully, the people there will find out about the program anyway and attend – and then realize that there are many ways to be a victim. One of them is to be denied access to information. You can always choose what you do with information you get, but you damn sure should get it. That is theoretically what living in the United States is supposed to be about.