ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the past is unlikely to be well-known, and certainly not agreed upon, making learning and deciding what to do difficult. Security professionals and bureaucratic administrators generally are often criticized for acting after the fact, shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped. The counterargument to this nostrum is that bureaucracies, like people, learn from experience. If experience is a key to learning and thus the evolution of security practice, then it matters that the past is so often contested. Former Special Forces soldiers and security operatives, white Europeans, helped shepherd hundreds of people to safety, with some help from a few individuals employed by mall security. A passion for the ordinary and paucity of flexible conceptual tools puts one in a bad position to say much about security policy, or any policy.
