Fearing Safety

It is a luxury of someone (white, educated, well above the poverty line) living in a democracy (at least for now) that I can expect pretty much expect to live without fear of being arrested unless I do something stupid. I live in a place where I can leave my car unlocked, both at home and at work if I should by some chance drive to work. My commute doesn’t take me through a war zone, unless you define the Solano County Mosquito Abatement Squad in those terms.

I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Maria from Alembic, who had it from the London Review of Books, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer and intellectual of staggering vitality. When I compare my life with hers, I see no hardship, no rigors, no wars. I see a privileged life as the daughter of an expatriate, endowed with two passports which expands your choices enormously of where to work (especially since they’re both “desirable” nationalities), where the obvious planting of oneself in opposition to the prevailing culture confers yet more privilege (sometimes points can be gained from being a Brit, even a stuffy one).

Going to the Code Pink Counter Convention in Davis’ Central Square tonight, I am filled with a mixture of fear and despair. Fear for the ignorance that might, just might, get Bush reelected. Despair because the world in such a scenario looks much worse than it did in the 70s, when it looked pretty bad, all those nights I stayed up arguing with my father about the Bomb.

We must not be safe. We must avoid hiding behind our gated communities, real or imagined, and feel as though all this is outside our sphere of influence, interest, or humanity. We must keep looking for a way to make our own existence more precarious—for the safety of all.

This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Making a Safe Space.