The Slippery Issue of Safety (Essay by Bob Racine)

The night was quite wet, the roads tending toward slick, and the shoulders on many stretches had turned to mud.  The year was 1954, and we were making some haste northward on Route 1, a two lane artery in those days (a few decades before limited access highways emerged) weaving its way through the countryside ten miles or so out of Raleigh, North Carolina.  It was somewhere, as I recall, around 10:00 pm.  I was one of four Wake Forest ministerial students returning to the campus on a Sunday night from a weekend extension trip, a passenger in the front seat, all of us eager to get back to our campus rooms and out of the rain. 

                            

We came around a curve and to our shock another car that had been headed southward, the opposite direction from ours, had crossed the road and hit a muddy embankment on our side and turned completely over.   The head and tail lights were still on, and the emergency lights flashing.  Obviously someone was still in the car, had not yet gotten out.

                            

Instinctively we pulled to a stop a few feet beyond the wreck and went on foot to render whatever assistance we could.  By the time we reached it, two persons, the driver and one passenger had started to crawl from it.  And to our amazement three or four other cars immediately also stopped.  It took a few moments for it to sink into our four minds - that the incident had just occurred seconds before, else how could we have been the first to come by on a main highway that busy?  Construct the picture in your minds: they had been going one way, and we the other; they had crossed the highway, right in our path, seconds before we reached the spot.  If we had arrived those few seconds earlier, a head-on collision would have most certainly occurred and the likelihood of severe injury, possibly death, would have been our fate.  We had been having lively conversation in the car up until that moment.  But from there on back to our college, over the next half hour or so, none of us spoke.  We were sobered; we all had done the calculation, and we were stunned and terrified over what was so apparent to us.

                            

That is probably the closest I have ever come in my eighty-two years to a tragic, senseless death.  It still gives me shivers reliving it in my memory.

                            

Danger we perceive as the opposite of safety, and safety is much on the minds of inhabitants of nations these days, following the terrorist attack in Paris.  What was perceived as safe surroundings has now been transformed into a perilous frontier seemingly under the partial control of savage marauders.  The citizens of the world have internalized the horror and suddenly the event is not thousands of miles away from our nests; we experience it as if it has happened right outside our doors and windows, on the very street where we live.  We have become nervous and fearful, even inside our front doors.  And when people become nervous and fearful, they tend to become desperate, and desperation can make them irrational – irrational enough to think that to prevent victimized migrants from entering our borders they have significantly reduced the chance of terrorists creeping in.  Overlooked in the near hysterical political rhetoric we have been subjected to is the fact that terrorism has become professionally organized, and professionals, despite our vetting processes, can find ways to get a foothold on our shores.  They have far more sophisticated devices than bedding down with a bunch of bedraggled migrants running from oppression.  Welcoming the migrants, on the other hand, is one way to hold the line against that very tyranny with which they have become innocently associated in the minds of governors and members of Congress. 

                            

(The desperation can also call forth latent bigotry, both in thought and action, which it is now doing up and down the country, but that is another subject for another essay.)

                            

We humans seek protection – by those with powers greater than our own, while we from time to time must remind ourselves that that protection is not foolproof.  We create environments in which we feel protected, while it remains true that we are not ultimately so.  We design homes and sanctuaries and we go to great lengths making those places cozy and comfortable and warm – all this to insulate ourselves against the raw outside, against danger and the boisterous and unpredictable elements that surround us.  Inside those places we seem to cancel out whatever the risk to which we would be otherwise exposed.  We go to great trouble to convince ourselves that we are protected and beyond the reach of capricious chance.

                            

Perhaps we all from time to time wish we had the myopia of Mr. Magoo.  He can walk nonchalantly through a mine field or across a rickety bridge or through one calamity-about-to-happen after another, and what he knows nothing about does not hurt him.  He proceeds on his breezy, cheerful way.  We do our level best to emulate him; we decide not to know about certain things, because what we do not know will not hurt us or even depress us, or so we assume.  But in the struggle to do this, we forget something that we may never have thought we knew.  In our homes we can create privacy, comfort, and to some extent protection.  But what we cannot create even there is safety, because. . .

                            

SAFETY IS AN ILLUSION!  Like it or not, the possibility of safety is an illusion!  

                            

Even in the most burglar resistant domicile the inhabitants are still subject to the dangers of food poisoning or deadly infections (either carried in from the outside or acquired from one another).  No manufactured comfort zone can provide us any guaranteed immunity from disease or heart attack or domestic accident.  So the best we can do is play the odds.  What are the odds against having our protective shield penetrated?  We calculate odds with mathematical precision, sometimes forgetting that odds are nothing more than estimates, guesswork.  We suffer shocks when things happen that we think could have been prevented.  Yet they happen, despite all our vigilance.

                            

And then there are the dangers we bring onto ourselves when we entrust our lives and our safety into the hands of airline pilots and far more when we take to the wheel of a car.  Those who have a fear of flying need only consult the statistics.  The chance of our meeting injury and/or death on the road is at least five hundred times greater than on a commercial air flight.  That fact has been driven home to me countless times when I have had a close call with another driver or when necessity has forced me to drive in inclement weather, and especially when I relive that chilling moment on the highway with my student friends in 1954.  Probably also the chance of death from ISIS is greatly exceeded by motoring in a car. 

                            

As we drive further and further into the twenty-first century, we hear with increasing frequency reports about the polar ice caps in a state of meltdown and the prospect, and some experts say the certainty, of massive rises in the ocean levels.  Nature continues to pull colossal tricks on the earth’s inhabitants.  The tsunamis that have battered Pacific islands and brought forth merciless tidal waves wreak unspeakable destruction upon thousands who thought their places of dwelling were secure.  They make all of us living in coastal areas feel qualms of uneasiness over the possibility that the Atlantic could deliver tsunamis as well, since no scientist has offered any assurance to the contrary.  The illusory ideal of safety gets to feel further and further from our grasps. 

                            

Tornados have descended with little if any advanced notice, and floods from unprecedented quantities of rainfall are living proof that battery from nature is not the sole fate of coastal dwellers.  And let us not forget that earthquakes give little if any warning.

                            

Where is Safety?  She is as mythical and make believe as a Greek goddess.

                            

How do we live meaningful, peaceful lives in such a world?  Are we to conclude that life is just a crapshoot?  Many, including myself, resort to faith and faith communities.  We know that life is precarious but with the quality of love, redeeming love shared, we prayerfully empower each other to what we call a life of simple abundance.  Though we never know when our lives will be required of us, we learn to be at peace within the world that surrounds us, a communal peace that so many on the planet do not know.  I have not done a study of Walt Whitman’s private life or of the religious life he might have espoused, but in penning these following words he had the right idea:

                            

Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,

your schemes, politics fail, lines give way,

substances mock and elude me,

only the theme I sing, the great and strong

possessed soul, eludes not. 

One’s-self must never give way; that is the final

substance, that out of all is sure ,

out of politics, triumphs, battles, life – what at last

finally remains.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.