The delusion of safety

A young man got shot last weekend in my neighborhood.  He had a history of drug arrests -- he also had a 2 year old.  He was 19.  He was shot multiple times in his car, where he was sitting next to a friend.  He staggered down the street for a ways and collapsed, dead.  A neighbor had a bullet go through his door and into the coffee table, where he'd been sitting only perhaps an hour earlier.

My quiet neighborhood of Cambridgeport is in an uproar.  We consider ourselves to be an oasis in a busy urban area.  One of the women in my neighborhood association said this was her last straw and she was moving.

I didn't go into a rant on how much better it was now than in the late 80's, when I moved from here to go to Chapel Hill.  Then, you would go by the Western Front -- a reggae club -- and see them replastering the wall, again, where a new drive-by had taken Jamaican gang rivals out.  Again.

But what I did do was point out that the murder rate in this area is 2.2 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.  And that's far better than the exposure she'd get driving more after moving to the suburbs:  about 14 in 100,000 yearly dying in car crashes.

One of the guys on the list thanked me for the post.  It was a pleasure, and a civic duty.

Panic in my neighborhood is a bad thing (although, truly, I could stand the rents to go down -- I need a new place in June...).  I'm hoping if I can seed this through the neighborhood association list, people will internalize it and spread it around.

Here's a "Eureka!" story.  I was riding my bike through the parking lot for the old Stop & Shop one day, in my early 20's (so, in our early 80's) when I nearly fell off my bike, because in swerving around potholes on the Magazine bit of the lot, I had a sudden epiphany that the concept of "safety" was a social fiction. 

There is no safety, only relative risk.  More harm is done in society because, for some reason, we are told we must value absolute safety.  We over-shelter our kids.  We panic over an incident like the shooting, when statistically it's benign.  We give over our civil liberties to tyrants in the name of safety.

So, that moment changed my life, because there are so few people who understand, in the fiber of their beings, how to navigate risks.  I've been an internet security officer for a major university campus, an entrepreneur, a political consultant (press, campaign manager, perhaps soon to be surrogate for a presidential candidate).

I really worry about our kids.  We teach them not to talk to strangers when we should be teaching them not to listen to them.  We teach them to be so careful not to get hurt that they don't develop healthy notions of how to assess their own capacities and risks; they aren't brave, but simply rebellious and blind in their risk taking as teens.  I wonder where our next level of imaginative thinkers and entrepreneurs and scientists will come from.

So when I see people cringing because their safety is compromised, it's hard not to rise to the occasion.  It's almost a religious impulse.

Be brave.  Live!