The Danger of Safety

The critical moment has come, the hour is late, and it is time for us to face the terrifying truth.

We are not safe. We will never be safe, and the desire to insulate ourselves from the dangers of the world is often far more destructive than the threats we are attempting to avoid.

On December 26th, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to ignite a bomb on a Northwest airline flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. This incident has the Obama administration scrambling to reassess our security procedures and convince the American public that it is doing everything possible to assure their safety.

Here are some of the proposals.

Full body scans required on all passengers at all airports.
Passengers must have their hands in plain sight one our after takeoff and before landing
Barring lavatory use for one hour after takeoff and before landing
Canceling all direct flights from "suspect" countries.
More Background checks
More random searches
More restrictive baggage rules
And our old friend racial profiling.

All of this at a cost of Billions of dollars, millions of man hours and perhaps the loss of a bit more of our humanity.

But, if it means saving even one human life, it’s worth it, isn’t it?

No. It’s not.

It’s time for us to get out of the risk elimination business and get into the business of risk management.

The truth is people are going to die. They will die in their bathtubs and in their cars. They will die in shootings, by lightning, from disease, and from old age. They will die by accident, and they will die by intent. In war and in peace.

The world is a dangerous, unpredictable place and anyone who says you can be 100% safe is a liar.

So does that mean we should eliminate all safety measures, tear down the security checkpoints, and rip all the seat-belts out of cars?

Of course not.

However, with limited resources, (and our resources have become very limited indeed) it is important to face our fears and make rational decisions about where we can save the most lives.

We are terrified of another attack. However, in the 8 years since 9/11 there has not been one successful airline, terrorist attack in the United States. Even including September 11th, deaths from terrorism represent only a tiny fraction of our annual, preventable deaths.

If the Northwest bomber had succeeded he would’ve added 290 deaths to that number. Would such an event have been a tragedy? Yes.

But compare that to the tens of thousands of deaths from auto accidents each year or the hundreds of thousands of deaths from preventable diseases like obesity and lung cancer.

Want to save real lives? Take all fast food and sugared soda off the market tomorrow or reduce the maximum speed on all American roadways to 35 miles per hour.

That’s it. We’ve just saved thousands of lives. But we don’t want to do that because we judge (and I think rightly) that the cost to our lifestyle, our economy and even our personal freedoms is simply too high.

However, we will sacrifice almost anything in order to protect ourselves from terrorism

We have given up our freedoms, sabotaged our economy, and fought two poorly conceived and irresponsibly, executed wars. We have cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers and not tens, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani people, the vast majority of whom have never attacked the United States. The result has been a wrecked economy, a devastated military and a world which, for the most part, sees America as a decadent, aggressive and wholly self interested giant.

All of this, in a vein attempt to make us safe.

I don’t want to give up on security. In fact, when it comes to the really big stuff, chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, I think we haven’t done nearly enough. We still haven’t secured our ports, or our nuclear facilities and we are still unable to control the world’s fissionable material.

However, I, for one, have no desire to see my nation, predicated on the concept of liberty, transformed into some kind of gated community, complete with background checks, strip searches and endless suspicion.

I choose instead to be less safe, to accept that tragedies will happen but that sometimes the price of freedom is not eternal vigilance, but rather the courage to face our fears and dare to hope.