Safety first

By Kelley Paul

A few years ago I watched a movie called “Safety Not Guaranteed” that I loved and highly recommend. I was thinking about it yesterday as a salesperson cheerfully exhorted me to “stay safe” as I checked out. It’s something we hear everyday now – from strangers, TV anchors, salespeople.

Safety is both the mantra and central desire of our times.

We demand that Joe Biden, or Anthony Fauci, or Google –-someone, anyone, please tell us exactly what to do to keep us safe. Anyone but ourselves, of course. It must be an authority, someone who is more “expert,” thereby absolving us of pesky decision-making, conflict, or God forbid, blame.

Thus freed of any essential responsibility, we are available for endless glazed-eyed scrolling, Netflix binging, and Uber-eating, all from the safety of the sofa. We are comfortable, dull, obedient, and insulated in body and mind.  Our fleecy sweatpants feel great and trolling “far right conspiracists” on Twitter gives us just the right hit of dopamine to feel even better – virtuous even! After all, we are following the rules! We are inside and safe and double masked, double-vaxxed, double-boosted, and we display the approved level of contempt or better yet, hatred, for those who are not.

But it’s not enough to keep ourselves safe. No. If others don’t comply they should be forced to do so, because their very act of noncompliance makes us feel uncomfortable, and vaguely concerned that maybe we should think a little harder about our own choices. And that’s just too much work. Plus it gives us FOMO if everyone isn’t lying on the couch.  (That’s why, according to Rasmussen, half of Democrats favor segregated camps, fines and prison terms for those who publicly disagree with COVID policy.  Remember, they have empathy! They just care more!)

And so we offload our discernment, our very agency as free adults, to others in the name of safety. Thank God Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins cared enough to do that  “devastating public takedown” of those annoying Stanford and Harvard epidemiologists, before we had to trouble our minds with their challenging ideas. It’s so much easier and more comforting to know that one man is “The Science.”

And thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and his anonymous, all-knowing fact-checkers, we will no longer have to see anything decreed to be misleading, dangerous or debunked – we won’t be aware of it at all! It’s great that we don’t have to trouble our pretty heads with ideas until they have been fully approved by the authorities.

After all, they are smarter than we are. Conspiracy theories about the US funding of the Wuhan lab, or cloth masks not stopping viral spread, or any other worrisome, conflicting ideas will be swiftly censored.

We instead, apparently, need to think about important things like ordering some new sweatpants from Amazon. These are getting snug.