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The Safety Culture

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Some cogent thoughts from Mollie Hemingway:

Many parents just can’t accept the reality that we’re not in as much control of our children as we wish. Last week my nephew went to an outdoor camp in Colorado with the rest of his 5th-grade class. They were supposed to stay just one night. Floods hit the region, the roads washed out and filled with boulders. There was nothing anyone could do. After being stranded for three days, the parents heard about plans to airlift the kids out via Chinook helicopter. That plan was halted when some parents complained it was too dangerous. Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?

Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a natural disaster.”

Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.

That’s the kind of culture that breeds the hypersafe culture of spaceflight that my book is all about.

And then there’s this:

My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context, that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.

The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it. Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” — Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.

Yup.

11 thoughts on “The Safety Culture”

    1. That’s something I was going to say. When I was ten, in the school holidays my friends and I would get on our bikes and go off wherever we felt like, returning home for lunch and dinner. None of our parents were following us around to see what we were doing, and no police patrols were sent out to find us.

      But there were five other kids if I happened to get run over by a bus. With only one or two, most parents are more scared (and less busy) these days.

  3. Having recently moved to the greater Capitol City area for work, it was surprising for me to see that even some areas here are rotting – i.e. planned developments slow to start or laying fallow, businesses closing up shop. Even with all the loot flowing in from across the country, the capitol can’t overcompensate for its overwhelming meddling.

  4. Per Leland, while safe is not an option, a perfect book is not an option either. At some point, ya gotta let it out into the wild.

  5. Wasn’t Bush and Cheney the ultimate hyper-reactive, unthinking “Safety” culture?

    Every government building has armed guards and x-ray machines and escorts because of “Terrorism”.

    They relocated the GW Parkway a quarter mile because of “Truck Bombs”.

    The 1% doctrine allowed attacks if there was a 1% chance of that country or entity being
    involved in terrorism?

    They poured hundreds of billions into DHS because of “Terrorism” building ‘fusion’ centers
    that are mostly used for domestic surveillance.

    And let’s not even start on the TSA.

    Me, I’d roll back FAA security to where it was in 1999, i’d disassemble the DHS and i’d focus on a
    rational middle east policy and i’d reopen Pennsylvania avenue to traffic.

    1. On this we can agree, the TSA is an utter joke, as is much of the DHS. For that matter, the NSA, CIA, and FBI aren’t exactly shining these days either. I don’t think anyone would shed a tear, left or right, if the budgetary ax came down hard on those agencies.

      1. if the budgetary ax came down hard on those agencies

        Agree! Pelosi is out claiming there is nothing more to cut, but there is plenty to cut. They haven’t even tried to cut. Yet Obama is out claiming “We will not negotiate!”, while the media claims it’s the GOP that won’t compromise. If the President is unwilling to work with the GOP and Pelosi will lie grandstand; then we have reached the point of gridlock. The federal government may need to be shutdown until the Democrats decide to quit putting politics over sound economic judgement and the willingness to negotiate.

        Cut TSA, gut DHS, and defund NSA’s domestic spying operations. And the EPA needs to be completely overhauled so that it isn’t a clearinghouse of legal settlements and payments to liberal organizations.

    2. Yep, terrorists commit an attack using knives and fake bombs, which couldn’t have been that expensive to carry out, and the government responds by spending untold billions and vastly expanding the bureaucracy and police powers. No argument there.

      And all this will do precisely jack squat to prevent the next attack. While TSA is making children take off their shoes and confiscating shampoo, the terrorists will no doubt concoct something equally as unexpected as 9/11.

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