There’s this Big Thread in our culture about companies, neighbors, businesses “keeping you safe.” Doing things / not doing things in order to keep you safe. Whether that’s restricting your ability smoke near my door, requiring a CoVid mask, putting up a railing in all the right places, or what ever.
These things do not keep you safe.
You keep you safe. Or you don’t. By the decisions you make every moment.
No one can do it for you, nor can any law.
Example: Tap water is pretty foul across most of America these days. It won’t kill you — not all at once — but it contains traces of the top 20 prescription drugs now (you can look that up online — I’m not making it up), plus amounts of lead, arsenic and other un-wonderful things. Alright, it’s also got chlorine in it, which “kills the bad stuff.” Well… hate to break it to you but chlorine won’t kill lead nor any of those traces of prescription drugs in the tap water. Also, the constant intake of chlorine has negative effects all of its own; it’s a poison, after all! You filter your tap water, or you don’t. Or you get a reverse-osmosis system and make your own actually clean water. Or you buy bottled water (and risk the solvents from the plastic, which are known carcinogens, by the way) or you don’t. Or you get a drinking water service that delivers in glass bottles or hard (solvent free) plastic ones. Your choice. The city can’t make your tap water safe(1) beyond a very rough, crude point, but you can. You have that option.
Example: CoVid masks keep you safer(2). So does the vaccine (actually, it’s not a vaccine and what it does do is reduce the chance that CoVid will be lethal should you actually “come down with it” — that’s all it does). Your vaccination does *not* keep me safe in any way. Nor does mine keep you safe.
In fact, the vaccine isn’t a traditional vaccine in any stretch of the word, nor is there any “herd immunity” in this case, not with this “vaccine.” It doesn’t work that way. It won’t keep you from getting CoVid, it won’t keep you from infecting others. All it does, all it’s meant to do, is reduce the chance that CoVid will kill you. That’s all. This means I *can’t* do anything to keep you from catching CoVid. I can’t. Only you can.
I can do a few things to limit my chances of catching it. Again, the vaccine does NOT reduce the chance of contracting it. So, mask, hand washing, immune-boosters, and a limited isolation are what I can do. For myself. For you, I can fail to sneeze in your direction; very little else that I do can have any meaningful effect on you.
Ok, that’s two examples; there are many, many, many more such in our “modern world.”(3)
Short version: *you* keep you safe. No one else can. Laws that make some one else responsible for your safety don’t really work, except to spread the blame around when things do go wrong. That’s all such laws accomplish.
Well… alright. Let me back-track a moment. Yes, there are cases where laws keep bad things from occurring [sometimes, at least]. But here’s the hitch with that: such laws — take building codes, for instance — set a minimum level of “safety” and “quality” but they also then end up setting the maximum level of safety in a building, and the maximum level of quality, because as long as “it passes code” that’s all we’re going to do, right?
So, such laws are two-edged, giving out a clear though subtle harm as well as a questionable benefit(4).
The problem is that you can’t legislate rational, ethical behavior.
You can’t.
You can’t enforce it; you can’t even require it.
You can’t.
Then there are the legislators that even try to repeal physics by simply passing a law. For example, pedestrian right of way laws. I watched over many years as state after state (in America) gradually passed pedestrian right of way laws. On doing so, pedestrian death rates would go up in that state. Immediately. Yet state and state keep passing them anyway. Such laws are, in fact, an attempt to repeal the laws of physics. A 1/4 ton vehicle moving at 25 or more miles and hour must stop for 150 pound pedestrian moving at 3 – 5 miles an hour? Truly? Have you people never heard of physics? Inertia? Friction (wheels can’t grip the road past a certain point)? Not to mention the reduced time for making the right decision, because the driver is moving 5 or more times faster than the walker? Plus the fact that for some silly reason the pedestrian thinks he is protected by this — truly absurd — law and so steps out in high-speed traffic, expecting some kind of miracle. Hence the rise in pedestrian death rates.
State after state, passing such laws, without noticing that these laws actively kill people. Because the People assign a non-existent power to some Law, Statute or Regulation or Executive Order. At the bottom line, these are just words, and words have no power.
I can’t keep you safe. You can keep you safe — or not. At the most, I can help, maybe point the way, especially if you ask me to help.
We each of us behave in an ethical / rational / positive way,
Or we don’t.
You can’t control someone else’s choices,
Nor should you try.
Laws are an attempt to control all of society, but they fall short,
Else “breaking a law” would be impossible.
All you can ever do is make your own choices(5).
You keep you safe. I keep me safe. I have to trust you are doing the best for yourself, or asking for what help you might need — which is also a fully respectable, ethical thing to do. Asking for help when you need it is Good! Asking for help when you don’t need it… well, that one’s obvious.
I have to trust you are keeping you safe. I would like you to trust I am keeping me safe. Neither one of us needs a Hallway Monitor, not since we graduated from the 2nd grade, at least. On the other hand if you do need a Hallway Monitor, then ask for one! That’s ok, too. Asking for one is still being self-responsible.
Don’t force a Hallway Monitor on me though; that’s rude. Beyond rude, really; it’s insulting(6).
[30]
(1) Actually, they could make it safe, and actually clean, too. But they’ll tell you it would cost too much, and then they’ll also tell that it’s not a problem anyway (because if it was, it “would cost too much to fix”).
(2) To a point. Masks come in various levels of effectiveness, depending on quality, material, last time it cleaned / replaced, and other factors. The neck-tubes and bandanas have actually been shown to be worse than no mask at all. Truth! Read the study; it was very thorough, but some how that data didn’t get passed along to legislators. To be fair, the legislators don’t have a lot of time to spend on any one issue. You can do better, yourself, though for matters that affect your so personally. We all can. Legislators have a lot on their plates.
(3) Here in lies the major risk with passing laws at all. It removes the right to think for yourself, which coincidentally removes the need to think for yourself, and eventually that removes the ability to think for yourself, thus requiring even more bone-head laws, which promotes even less thought… Bad cycle. Certainly some laws are necessary, but I question that the current system is the best of all possible ones.
(4) Computer “security” is another Big, Big example of the Smoke and Mirrors of “others keeping me safe,” so full of baloney, smoke and BS that I don’t even want to go any further down that trail… but it is another example of how no one can keep you safe except yourself, and further an example of how “security” enforced from outside can actually make things worse, sometimes much worse.
(5) Of course “choices” come with ramifications, benefits or penalties, or (more likely) both. You choose to go against a law of society, that may have consequences. You choose to obey a law of society, that too may have consequences. But do choose. Choose. Exercise the reason and free will that God imbued you with. Otherwise just show up once or twice a year to have your wool shaved off; that too might benefit society. Ba-aa-aah!
(6) Rude is always insulting, in truth:
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness.
Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters.
A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
~ Robert Heinlein
