Tuesday, August 30, 2011

#104 Protection and Safety

In a buzz of public conversation not long ago about the danger of contact sports and the long-term health impact of concussions, one comment leapt out at me: football players would be safer from concussion if they didn’t wear so much protective head gear. Back in the early days of the game, with thin leather helmets and everyone’s face exposed, people took more care about how they treated each other. All the padding and grills make players fair game for anything.

I was reminded of how obsessed our culture is with protection. I have a friend who talks about the “protection racket”—and I have to ask, how much of the energy that we put into protection, both physical and emotional, actually ends up making us less safe?

I think of the parents who hover over their children, trying to shield them from all danger--and the children who grow up never having developed their ability to judge risk or respond to danger. Or there are the rules in early childhood program, set up to keep children safe: bleach the toys, sanitize the table tops, eliminate exposure to dirt. Well it turns out that bleach and sanitizers bring their own safety hazards, and without access to dirt, children can’t build up critical antibodies.

Or we wall ourselves into gated communities and become targets, losing access to the connections and relationships that might actually increase our safety in the long run. Or we drill into our children’s psyches the danger of trusting any stranger even a little bit. Their capacity to trust is damaged forever, and many of them end up getting abused anyway by some someone they know--a far more common scenario.

Some of us fear danger and do everything we can to avoid it. Others put all our attention to developing foolproof protections so we can court danger without negative consequences. Both are problematic.

Fear of danger actually increases it. Yellow jackets and dogs, for example, can smell fear and go straight toward it. More generally, when we’re afraid, we’re not likely to be thinking at our best, which makes us more vulnerable. And the quest to develop “foolproof” protections leads us to the irrationalities of fancy headgear and increased concussions, guns in the home and increased gun-shot accidents, an out-of-control arms race and increased global insecurity.

Our urge to protect ourselves and our loved ones is natural, and there are real dangers, but somehow we need to find a third way. I think it will have to be grounded in judgment, engagement and connection. This third way would provide opportunities to take all kinds of (small-sized) risks, where we can build our judgment and confidence. It would include lots of practice in how to defang danger by moving toward it with curiosity and respect. The ultimate goal of any endeavor would be not safety but connection and meaning (with safety taken into consideration along the way). In this third way, good relationships would be recognized as the bedrock of our common security.

If the rules were adjusted so that football could be played again without helmets, my guess is that it would be safer, and just as interesting to play and watch--maybe even more so, since some of the lost blunt force would have to be made up for by added flexibility, intelligence and skill. It seems like a good trade-off in general: fewer fear-based rules and protections, less blunt force, more flexibility and connection, and more real safety.





Burden

Weighed down
with excess from my pantry
on my back

(Word had gone out
the food bank in a local church
was out of staples for the month)

Find the neighbor’s porch
and the big cardboard box

Unload
straighten, stretch
walk home
much lighter now.





Some things that have made me hopeful recently:

A Greenpeace boycott campaign which has succeeded in convincing the largest palm oil producer in Indonesia to announce a plan to protect forests and carbon-rich peat lands across all of its operations.

The enactment this year by Connecticut of the first state-wide law guaranteeing workers the right to earn paid sick days (SB 913).

Wiser Earth, the Social Network for Sustainability (www.wiserearth.org), which has created a database of over 2 million non-governmental organizations world wide working on the challenges we face (check out their short video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzMPUKAXM7U).

The on-going protest against social and economic injustice in Israel, with many tents in central places all over the country as focal points for gathering and discussion, and mass demonstrations--initiated and led by young adults and women, and including in one week 3% of Israel, or the equivalent of 9.2 million people in the US.

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