The Illusion of Safety

"Is it safe?" echoes a tinny voice through a New Jersey convenient store.  The customer, who appears to be alone in the store, is confused.  "Is it safe?" the voice repeats.  Still confused, and slightly agitated as the question is repeated again and again, the man responds, "Is what safe?"  Still, the voice repeats the question, eventually driving the customer mad.  He runs out of the store, causes a fiery auto wreck, and then somehow bursts into flames himself.  The voice is then revealed to be that of slacker jerk-off Randal, one of the main characters in the unfortunately (extremely) short-lived Clerks cartoon show.

It's a funny gag to open the show, but in our safety-obsessed culture I am starting to feel like that customer.  At any point I may find myself running out into the street howling.  I may spontaneously combust.   And that's because every time I hear "Is it safe?" or a similar question, I wonder if I'm the only person who realizes that safety is an illusion.  The universe is ruled by chaos; we are never safe because anything can happen at any time.

Remember how after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 everybody was nice to one another for like two days?  That quickly gave way to mistrusting anybody with a slightly darker skin tone, being suspicious of that guy in accounting who sometimes eats Middle Eastern food for lunch, and demanding that the government use any means necessary to keep us safe.  "Here, the government, here's the Bill of Rights. Just cross out any of these items that will get in the way of your attempts to keep us safe!"  In response to the public's demand for safety at any cost, the United States invaded a country to combat an enemy that it didn't fully understand, and under the same banner of keeping people safe, invaded a second country which an alarming amount of Americans still believe had something to do with the attacks on 9/11. (It didn't.)  All of this was to ensure safety, unless of course you were one of the thousands of U.S. troops who got deployed to these areas, or any of the hundreds of innocent families who happened to get caught in the crossfire.   Let's just quietly file the deaths of all those soldiers and civilians under C, for Collateral Damage, and enjoy a hearty thumbs up for American safety!

United States defense spending for 2013 is estimated at 901.4 billion dollars.  (Compare this to the 136.1 billion set aside for education, and you can start to understand how things like Snooki happen.)  But with all of this deficit-increasing spending being pumped into the military, do we have any reason to believe that we're any safer than we were on September 10th, 2001?  Let's face it, we can spy on, capture, interrogate, and torture (oops, did I say torture?  I meant... aggressively converse with) anybody that we view as a threat, but the most successful attacks are always the ones that nobody sees coming.  Since we can't see everything that's happening everywhere at all times, and since we can't read minds, we have no way of guaranteeing safety.  Suppose you fall soundly asleep in the false comfort of believing we're safe from our enemies, only to wake up late.  You rush out the door, crank up the Hans Zimmer Batman movie music (everybody does this when they need to get somewhere in a hurry, right?  Just me?), and begin your way-over-the-speed-limit trek to work.  Five minutes into this trek you die in an awesome auto crash.  So much for safety.

Since I'm no military expert, and this is starting to veer dangerously into rant territory, I'll switch gears and roll with the subject of car crashes.  (Only one of the puns in the preceding sentence was intentional.)  We all love those car commercials that show cars, "driven" by crash test dummies, slamming into walls at high speeds.  Man, those are great.  They were so popular at one point that there was even a toy line and cartoon show based on the concept, back in that late 80s/early 90s heyday where anything and everything was turned into a cartoon and toy line.  The toys were great; cars that were designed to crack and blow apart on impact, and action figures that were also designed to crack and blow apart on impact.  Finally, moms had no reason to yell at us for throwing our toys down the steps.  "Relax, mom, I'm not ruining my toys.  I'm studying safety so I can grow up to be a well-informed consumer."

But the real reason the commercials exist is to show off how safe the vehicles are.  "Look," the advertisers are saying, "You can crash your minivan into a concrete wall going sixty-five miles per hour, and you and your family probably won't die!"  That's all well and good, and I'm thankful that automobile manufacturers have teams of scientists who get the sweet job of crashing cars all day, but still, the safety is an illusion.  No matter how cautious you are on the road, and no matter how many airbags they manage to stuff into your car, that's not going to matter if you get crushed by an 18-wheeled death machine.  It's not going to help you if you bought one of the units produced on the day the safety inspector had a really bad hangover and kinda sorta fell asleep a little bit while on the job.  And it certainly won't help you if upon stepping out of your vehicle you are mistaken for Paul McCartney by a deranged lunatic (even though you look more like Ringo Starr), and he shoots you because he hated "Temporary Secretary".  It's all random.  It could happen.

One of the dangers of creating the illusion of safety is the unintentional creation of ignorance.  A perfect example of this is the manner in which children are boarded onto public school busses.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping children safe, and I think it's fine that it's illegal to pass a school bus when its red lights are flashing.  Where the problem arises is that public schools seem to have forgotten to teach children that in every other scenario in their lives, crossing the street can be dangerous if you don't pay attention.  Children grow up with the false sense that the world stops for them when they need to cross the road, and these children eventually become ignorant teenagers who walk into traffic with their eyes affixed on their various pods and pads or regular cell phones (if they're poor).  Hopefully the safety inspector was on the ball the day he inspected the brakes of the SUV that has to come to a dead stop in half a second because your oblivious ass just wandered out into the street while the light was against you.

At the University of Scranton there's a section of a busy street where recently they put up a set of flashing signs to warn drivers that there may be college students crossing.  I understand and firmly believe that a person operating a motor vehicle has to be focused on what's happening up ahead, and it's that person's responsibility to not turn an everyday commute into Death Race 2000, but come on!  If you're 18 years old and you haven't learned to cross the street safely, you probably shouldn't have been accepted into college.  There's absolutely no excuse for legally being an adult but not looking both ways before you walk.  Anytime I'm in a situation where an object that outweighs me by thousands of pounds may collide with my soft human body, I try to be certain that such an object is far enough away for me to move from point A to point B without being turned into what looks like an exploded Italian entree.

Still, though, I could cross the street with confidence that I can do so safely, only to be decapitated by a sign that falls off of a local business, because the owner's nephew's girlfriend's brother was touted as "the best, the best" person to put up the sign but actually had no idea what the hell he was doing.  It's chaos.  It's random events occurring in random sequences that we try desperately to find patterns in so we can try to predict what will happen next and thus feel safe.  It's an illusion.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not trying to convince anybody to start living like a reckless idiot because the idea of safety is hopeless.  It's good to be cautious so you don't die an idiot death that people will laugh about when they read it as a blurb in a "Wacky News" section of a free newspaper.  But just be weary of the dangers of relying on everybody else to keep you safe.  Whether the military has a budget of 900 billion dollars or 900 dollars and coupons to Chet's Discount Guns 'n' Stuff, they won't be there to protect you when your shoelace gets sucked into the metal mouth at the top of the escalator.  No matter how many safety features the auto industry puts into your car, they're not going to help you when you get shot at because you have a habit of cutting people off and then driving way slower than they were going.

Be cautious, but be realistic.  The world is full of dangers both seen and unseen.  There's no way to predict the future, so there's no way to ensure that it will be safe.  "Live each day like it's your last." is a cliche, for sure, but it also happens to be good advice, because you never know when you're going to get mauled by an escaped gorilla or accidentally ingest some doo-doo meat.  Let your children fall down so they can learn to pick themselves back up.  Teach them to pay attention to their surroundings.  Stop obsessing over safety, because at the end of the day, there's only so much you can control.  And if you work for the government, see if you can maybe get a little more money flowing into the education system.  The dumber the populace gets, the harder it is to keep them safe while they relinquish all responsibility for doing so themselves.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to make my Crash Dummies fight my Hasbro WWF figures.  It's unfair, but so satisfying.