The word
Paratus — Latin for prepared.
One word carries the whole idea. To be paratus is not to live in fear; it is to live free of it. A prepared person is calm because they have done the work — the training, the drilling, the quiet discipline that turns a crisis into a task. Our mottos follow from it: Creati Liberi — created free — and Paratus ad Omnia — prepared for all things.
The model we inherit
A society of professionals, organized by chapter.
After the Revolution, the officers who had served together formed the Society of the Cincinnati — a fraternal society organized into state chapters, bound by shared service and a commitment to the republic they had built. We take that structure as our pattern: a professional society, organized chapter by chapter, that admits members by standard rather than by crowd. Ours begins with the Heartland Chapter in Omaha. It is the first of what we intend to be many.
Our ground
Rooted in the Heartland.
In the summer of 1804, on the bluffs above the Missouri near here, the Lewis and Clark expedition held its first council with the tribes of the plains — the meeting that gave Council Bluff its name. It was a moment of preparation and parley at the edge of a continent, carried out by disciplined people far from help. We find it fitting that this society begins on the same ground.
What we are — and are not
Paratus Society is a lawful, professional preparedness society. We are endowed, as the founders put it, with rights from our Creator, and we mean to be worthy of them through readiness and service. We are not a militia, not a political organization, and not secret — exclusive, but open about who we are and what we stand for.
