The Odds

Two Decades After 9/11, Are We Safer?

I don't know. Define "safe."

I will admit to a certain level of "safety fatigue." Any number of events that have occurred over the past twenty years have prompted people to question how safe they are and government and business officials to scramble to make people safe. But what does "safe" actually mean?

A lot of the time, I am left with the feeling that safe is taken to be a state of affairs where nothing bad happens to anyone, ever. No matter what the threat, someone swoops in with something that renders it, at most, a mild inconvenience. I understand that, were I to ask people for their understanding of safety, that this isn't what they would tell me, but when I observe people, and the way that "the powers that be" respond to people, that's the impression that I'm left with.

For myself, my life tends to feel "unsafe" as a matter of course. This morning, I narrowly missed having the front end of my car removed by a Tesla driver who didn't appear to think that red lights applied to her, and I've seen enough overturned vehicles and multi-vehicle smash-ups to realize that every time I casually run down to the mall or to the bookstore, I'm taking my life into my hands. The sneaking suspicion that one day, I'm going to take one too many unnecessary jaunts never really goes away.

Having made it to middle age, I'm no longer in the group of Black men for whom homicide is the number one cause of death; other things have taken its place. Technically, I was never in much danger of becoming a statistic in that manner; I've spent almost all of my adult life living in neighborhoods that one might accurately describe as "lily White." Of course, that comes with its own set of problems, but they are somewhat (if not entirely) less likely to be lethal.

But, all things considered, I'm likely to live until natural causes, like cancer or heart disease, catch up to me. In that sense, my life is "safe," and nothing about the past twenty years, neither terrorism, heat waves nor worldwide pandemic, has changed that. And maybe that's the thing. The attacks on the World Trade Center were flashy, but in the set of risks that existed in my life, it barely registered. I was, quite literally, on the other side of the continent. For all that it dominated the news cycle for a time, my life went on as usual. I hadn't felt to rate my life on some sort of "safety index" prior to that point, and I feel even less incentive to do so now. Tomorrow is unpredictable, and so I don't put any effort into worrying about what it might bring. At least, not if I plan to sleep in the intervals between todays and tomorrows.

The likelihood that I will die one day is, more or less by definition, 100%. Many questions of safety become caught up in attempting to understand what the chances are for any given day, between now and that indefinite point in the future. (Of course, not all threats to one's safety end in death, but since this came up in the context of the al-Qaeda attack on New York City, death tends to figure in people's assessments of safety as concerns a repeat.) For me, that chance has been the same for quite some time, vanishingly small, but not zero. How many decimal places are in that percentage isn't of interest to me.