Is the Absence of Danger Really Safety?

Safety is not the absence of danger, rather the awareness of danger. A person walking down a street with a sharp cliff on either side is only safe if they know the cliff is there. You may feel safe before you know about the cliff, but that won't keep you from falling off.

If you grew up in a world with no dangers, you would never know how to act when faced with those dangers. A child, who is raised in the country with few cars, will not know how to react when moving to a town next to a major highway that is bustling with cars and people. A child who is raised by that same highway, however, might know that walking down the sidewalk is safe, but knows if he walks onto the highway, he will get hurt.

The point I am trying to make is, even if you remove all the dangers you think you have in your life, something will always find you. It could be a bolt of lightning or a flood, it doesn't matter, danger will eventually be introduced into your life.

When the city of Pompeii was built, the people who lived there thought it was safe because they had never seen the volcano erupt. Once it did, the entire city was destroyed along with all of the people in it. The people living in New Orleans thought they were safe before Hurricane Katrina because they had never had a hurricane that strong hit them before and they thought the levees would hold. Once the hurricane did hit, the entire town was flooded. Any person living near a fault line, but has never been in an earthquake, also fall into this false sense of security even though they are close to danger.

Luckily in today's world, we have ways to protect against danger and that is the best way to be safe. Most buildings are required to be built with certain features to help the building stay intact during an earthquake, no matter where they are at. We have ways to detecting when volcanoes will erupt and we track the strength of hurricanes and have evacuation plans in place when either is going to be a problem. Most of us know that we can not pretend that the absence of danger means we are safe.

There is more to this than natural disasters. Just because your house has never caught on fire does not mean that it never will. You still carry homeowner's insurance and go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't happen. We make sure that our kids know what to do if there is a fire and put fire alarms and extinguishers in our houses. You carry insurance on your car in case you are in an accident, even if you have never been in one and we all know how to call 9-1-1 in an emergency.

Living your life assuming there is no danger in your life, does not mean you are safe; it is quite the opposite, really. The only way you can be truly safe is to know what dangers there are and make sure you are ready when they show up.