Oct 20, 2020
Trigger Warning:
On this episode of the Resistance Library Podcast Dave and Sam
discuss Americans obsession with safety and the rise of political
correctness.
It’s a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world. Americans
in particular are obsessed with
“safety.”
The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning
law or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to
invoke a simple sentence:
“A
kid might get hurt.”
Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world
a safer place. But the operating word here is
“reasonable.”
Banning lawn darts, for example, rather than just telling people
that they can be dangerous when used by unsupervised children, is a
perfect example of a craving for safety gone too far.
Beyond the realm of legislation, this has begun to infect our very
culture. Think of things like
“trigger
warnings” and
“safe
spaces.” These are part of broader cultural trends in search of a
kind of
“emotional
safety” – a purported right to never be disturbed or offended by
anything. This is by no means confined to the sphere of academia,
but is also in our popular culture, both in
“extremely
online” and more mainstream variants.
Why are Americans so obsessed with safety? What is the endgame of
those who would bubble wrap the world, both physically and
emotionally? Perhaps most importantly, what can we do to turn back
the tide and reclaim our culture of self-reliance, mental
toughness, and giving one another the benefit of the doubt so that
we don’t
“bankrupt
ourselves in the vain search for absolute security,” as President
Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about?
You can read the full article “Bubble-Wrapped
Americans: How the U.S. Became Obsessed with Physical and Emotional
Safety” at Ammo.com.
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