America has never been "safe", nor can it ever BE "safe"

We have been LUCKY. Two oceans, two relatively friendly neighbors and our former standing in the world have been our only "real" protection.

Whenever some organization or wacky person has WANTED to do harm, they have been able to. We may "catch them" and punish them, but reacting AFTER the harm has been done, is NOT the same as "protecting us from harm"..


When the Japanese attacked pearl Harbor, the people who died or were injured were NOT protected.

When Kennedy was assassinated, where was HIS protection?

Same for Lincoln & McKinley & Garfield.

When the Pilgrims landed, they were not "safe".

When the pioneers ventured west, they were not "protected"

No one ever protected the Native Americans.

In a country that values free will and the concept of freedom,no government can ever really "protect" their citizens.

Police say they serve and protect, and to an extent they do. Their visibility may stop some criminals, but for the determined out there, the presence of police is no deterrent.

To believe that the crew in charge wants to keep us safe, or is capable of protecting us, is to believe in a fairy tale. These are the people who are the staunchest supporters of rugged individualism,personal responsibility, and all the other libertarian tenets.

All we can ever ask of our nation's leaders is an awareness and attention to details. The gang in charge is not detail-oriented.. They are "skimmers".

We are Lucky, until our luck runs out, and then there is always someone to blame, but the issue of protection is not an option..Never was..never will be unless we are willing to hand over every shred of control to a central government which will lock down borders, strip search at will and even then, a determined "attacker" will usually prevail.

A conscious effort to rebuild the burned bridges, and to re-engage in the world community will be our best bet to restore some of the Lucky Safety we have lost over the last 5 years.

Out leadership has not only compromised whatever inherent safety we had, they have painted a bulls-eye on the back of every American.

I personally loathe the word safe. What an absurd concept! in the way that we mean it.

We seem, however, to think it is our right. I'm just in the opening pages of Goodwin's biography of Lincoln. The thing that stands out so far is how unsafe it was to be on this earth. Safe, as good as it seems, and we are so very much safer than Abe's generation, can at a certain point become a prison.

also an illusion that one man can make us all safer. plus there's always super volcanoes and earthquakes, not to mention terrorists.

and in the end, we all die anyway....no one is safe from the grim reaper:)

(the ones we have left) in pursuit of an illusory "perfect security," that isn't really possible anyway. To imagine that "perfect security" is really an achievable goal may also be more likely to lead us into over-reacting to threats, and that over-reaction itself often becomes the true threat to our security.

Edited to add: Recommended. Thanks for posting this.

No one can live a real life and expect safety. When you are a toddler, you are probably at your safest, since everyone around you watches you 24/7, but once you start to venture out on your own, you have lost security, unless you are willing to be locked in a room somewhere and be guarded around the clock

I had ancestors who were early settlers here. Think of what it must have been like to leave England, and take such a long (unsafe) journey, to embark on a new life in what was really a wilderness. And life is not unlike what my ancestors experienced for other people on other continents today; darn hard and certainly not safe. What percentage of the people of the world have anything like the safety that seems so basic as to be invisible to us here in the US.

I would like to think that when and if I might be faced with the sorts of life-changing decisions that I know my ancestors must have been faced with, that I too would choose freedom over security. Of course, it may not ever be that clear cut a choice, then or now. But the very nature of Western civilization requires us to have freedoms for it to continue to exist. I don't want to lose that.

and came to think that the government "could" take care of us. They are supposed to have a military to prevent an invasion, but armies invading us are the least of or worries, and the government has pretended that because no one ever invaded us, it was THEIR doing.