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.

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Reform, yes. Defund the police? Absolutely not

The Washington Times‘ Beverly Smith-Brown (Lead Coordinator for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia for the Woodson Center’s Voices of Black Mothers United initiative, and President of Momma’s Safe Haven) makes clear that a strong police presence is important to public safety, particularly for minorities.

“Police brutality against unarmed Black people has rightly generated national outrage,” writes Smith-Brown. “But criminal violence takes the lives of far more Black people than police brutality does.”

She continues, “When a Black youth is killed by the hands of the police, it becomes front-page news. But when a Black youth is killed by the hands of a Black or brown person, it becomes just another senseless murder.”

The defund the police movement “has made things worse by pushing law-enforcement away and making them more hesitant about protecting our neighborhoods. Police presence in our neighborhoods is smaller, and it’s making our streets more unsafe…”https://t.co/cMKDapSYfZ

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 3, 2021

Our nation’s capitol is a good example of why a strong law enforcement presence is needed.

“Washington, DC, is not alone in facing a growing epidemic of criminal violence,” Smith-Brown notes. “American cities saw a 33% increase in criminal homicides in 2020. This year, homicide rates in large cities are up nearly 25% percent for the beginning of 2021…”

“This is why we are speaking out against defunding the police,” Smith-Brown declares. “This movement has made things worse by pushing law-enforcement away and making them more hesitant about protecting our neighborhoods. Police presence in our neighborhoods is smaller, and it’s making our streets more unsafe.”

“Black people do not want the police to be pushed out and defunded,” she observed.

Smith-Brown then notes an important poll number.

“In a national poll last year, 81% of Black people said they want more, not less, police presence in their communities.”

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