To “be prepared” essentially means to be ready to perform what needs to be performed during an emergency to ameliorate the situation at hand, as well as to have the necessary tools to enact what needs to be enacted in response to that emergency. This would indicate that in order to be prepared, one needs to be cognizant of dangers that could or might occur, and while not every contingency can be accounted for, the infrastructure and response for an untoward event can be prepared for, in which, it is inexcusable for the richest nation that the world has ever known, not to be prepared because adverse events are a part of life. Indeed, those then that are the best prepared are the same who deal with these events courageously and effectively; whereas, those who are not prepared, suffer dearly for their lack of preparedness.
We find thereby that there are events in American history that expose, how unprepared America has been, such as the “Day of Infamy,” at Pearl Harbor, in 1941. Yet, no matter how dastardly that attack was, America was not prepared for it, even though Japan was intent to be the dominant power in the Western Pacific, and because America had cut off Japan’s access to necessary materials, such as steel and oil, this helped to force the hand of Japan who thereby felt that strategically it made sense to try to cripple the American fleet, to thus place itself into a superior position in the Pacific.
Another example of inexcusable preparedness is that airlines were subject to being hijacked, and experienced a fair amount of hijackings from the 1960s through the early 1970s, of which, the powers that be, were slow to comprehend exactly how dangerous it was for an enemy agent to take control of an aircraft, and didn’t correctly anticipate that with all of the fuel that an airliner needs to have in order to travel, that at an airplane under the control of suicidal persons could be utilized as a destructive flammable device, which was accomplished to great effect, by the 9/11 hijackings.
So too, when it comes to COVID, we find that despite America’s massive healthcare apparatus, and the knowledge that pandemics could occur, as seen by smaller pandemics in the 21st century, such as SARS, Ebola, and the swine flu – this thus indicated that despite such prewarning, America was still not prepared for a global pandemic, which dutifully occurred; and thereby ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Additionally, America also wasn’t well prepared for what steps would be necessary to take concerning businesses, schools, and human interactions, whatsoever. This was especially disappointing and exhibited an extreme lack of preparedness by American governance, which in conjunction with America’s inability to formulate a coherent response, exacerbated the situation, to debilitating effect.
To be prepared means not only having the tools of the trade to deal with adverse events but also having the wherewithal and vision to create the infrastructure that would permit the governance to respond robustly and effectively to those adverse events, while also having perpetually the personnel so necessary to be on that watchtower, for the very purpose of responding to such in a determined and vigorous way.