The Dangerous Idol of "Safety"

Piggy-backing off of my last post about 9/11, I wanted to revisit an old topic - one that I've written about before and which I believe has some potential to be a 'history-repeating-itself' type thing in the very near future. The context for previous writing on this topic was COVID. At that time, as most of us remember, there was a big, scary new virus on the scene and so, as governments do, the government stepped in with a bunch of ideas, which soon became more than just ideas, about how to slow the spread. First it was the '15 days to slow the spread' lockdowns, along with masking and social-distancing guidelines, which turned into labels of 'essential' and 'non-essential'...and which led to the closure of many businesses. Then, as a vaccine was developed, they started with strong recommendations to 'get vaxxed' and continue to get new vaccinations against new variants, etc. Then pretty soon we had vaccine cards, and suddenly employment was tied to vaccination status (for some). All this was done in the name of 'safety' and while I'm sure that some of these measures saved some lives, they undoubtably also took lives. For example - how many people who had life-threatening illnesses and who were hospitalized ended up dying because no immediate family was allowed to come and sit with them? How many people, facing isolation because of government safety recommendations, or seeing their entire life's work crumble like a house of cards because their business was labeled 'non-essential', ended up deciding to end their own lives? This is what I mean when I say that these measures ended up taking lives.

On 25 Years of Remembering 9/11

While I could do without the emotionalism of 9/11 remembrances 25 years on, I have found that I'm endlessly fascinated with people's stories of where they were that day. EVERYONE remembers. I've yet to meet a single person (of remembering age) who doesn't remember basically that entire day. Whenever the topic comes up, I always ask what that person remembers about that day and it's always interesting to me. Somewhat ironically, 9/11 remembrance is also the reason I first felt like an old man...I was asking a couple of co-workers a few years ago about 9/11 and they didn't have any memories...because they were either infants or not born yet.