Modern life has left us with the illusion that if one just arranges things ‘properly’, we can be safe. This feeling of safety is ultimately illusory, though – we can’t actually arrange life in order to make ourselves perfectly safe. But safety is something we long for – or at least the feeling of safety is something I long for.

Recently they found a dead man on the hill up the street from me. My hill. The hill I walk halfway up about three times a week. The hill I drive over several times per week. “Active murder investigation” are the words that the police have used. I’ve been thinking about it all day, because my reaction is odd. I’m nonplussed. “Oh. A dead guy up there, huh? Yep, had to happen sometime”.

I don’t feel any less safe today than I felt yesterday. I have other concerns in my neighborhood. You’d think a dead guy would affect my feeling of safety, wouldn’t you? It does not. I was annoyed with the news reporters who got the address wrong and had my SIL calling me worried that it might have been her brother or our son than worried for myself.

Why is that? Well, because the feeling of safety in my neighborhood is simply something I don’t have. I wish I had it, but what I have is a 120lb dog. My neighbors (all of whom also have big dogs) appreciate my fluffy linebacker… they know they’re safer with her around too. She does her job. But she can’t make me perfectly safe, even though she’s rarely farther than five feet away from me.

I was looking at history books, trying to find what the survivors of Bad Times had in common. What’s safe, when Rome falls? Definitely don’t be in an easy path for armies to tread, that’s helpful. But a few centuries later, a volcano blew up and the problem changed from armies marching across the landscape to raiders on longboats. The “safe place” stopped being safe.

Remember the meme about bear vs. man? To this day I don’t know why the men were offended that women chose “bear”. Any newspaper will tell you that humans (men or women) are far more dangerous than bears. There’s a grizzly bear on my state flag – and no grizzly bears are left in my state. Men killed them. The question was written to be as vague as possible.

“You’re in a forest with…” Okay. How big is the forest? How close am I to my companion? Will I necessarily interact with them? How long will each of us be in the forest?

“A bear” … What kind of bear? Koala? Black bear, not much bigger than my dog? Hungry polar bear?

“or a man”… What kind of man? How old is he? Drugs? Mentally stable? Can I have 60 seconds to evaluate him? Does he know that I’m in the forest?

That feeling of safety leans bear for most of us. Why? Well, there’s every chance that it’s a black bear, who’s always lived in the forest, and I’m on a hiking path for a day. Mr. Bear just wants to chow down on some berries and has zero interest in me. That bear will avoid me if he can hear me coming. I should worry?

Or it could be the teenager strung out on meth that I had to walk around to buy my daughter a train ticket the other day. She wanted a ride in my car… Who am I safer with, the berry-eating bear, or her? I will take bear, thank you. And she was a girl, much smaller than I am and in poor health. A man who is almost certainly bigger than I am is much more potentially dangerous. This is not an insult.

But the feeling of safety changes if you have a chance to evaluate your companion. If you ask the question, “man or bear”? and then say, “but you get a chance to get a good look at the man”, I’d guess the percentage answer would flip. After all, I’d be happy to walk through the forest with most men, or let them get on with their business while I got on with mine. Just let me get a good look at their eyes…

It’s uncertainty that changes the dynamic, uncertainty that fractures the feeling of safety. And maybe that’s why Dead Guy doesn’t make me feel any less safe than I did the day before I heard the news. I always knew that walking around the empty lot that he was found in was unsafe – nothing has changed.

Someday, I dream of moving somewhere I feel safe… it will probably have bears. But in this case, I think we can all agree that bears are better than humans. It wasn’t a bear who killed that man.