Imagine two people - neighbors living next door to each other in an apartment building. (They might even be friends, but it's unlikely, as America's political divide dictates.) In one apartment, a man lives alone, has a steady job, goes about his daily life, and goes to bed at night, sleeping soundly with his front door and sliding glass back door securely locked. In the second apartment, a man lives alone, has a steady job, goes about his daily life, and goes to bed at night - but he sleeps fitfully, sometimes awakened by "sounds" that may, he thinks, be caused by someone trying to break into his apartment. So the second man gets an extra lock for his front door, and puts a metal rod in the runner of his glass back door. But the sounds he hears at night persist. So he pays for a security service and installs an alarm. Then he gets a dog, and pays the deposit to his landlord to have it. Finally, when he still can't sleep, he purchases a Smith & Wesson .38 calibur pistol, and loads it with semi-jacketed hollow point rounds (for greater stopping power). But even with the loaded gun lying within reach in the night table drawer, he can't sleep soundly, and gets up in the morning, still tired.
Now, the question I have to ask is: will building a wall on the border with Mexico help the second guy get some sleep?
Now imagine, as hard as it might be, living in a place where you feel so secure and safe that, when you leave your house to go run an errand, you don't feel the need to lock your door. You walk away from your house not thinking "Oops! I forgot to lock the door." You don't even have to think about it. You just do it. The door closes behind you and you go and get in your car and you drive away and never once does it occur to you that you forgot to lock your door. The next question I want to ask some people is, would you want to live in such a place - such a town, such a state of our Union? Because there are such places. I have visited some of them.
As a lifelong city-dweller, I would still lock my door if I lived in such a place, and not from force of habit. Maybe it would take me years to get over the natural sense of insecurity that I developed over the years of living in cities. Maybe I would never get over it. There are some who would say that the people who don't lock their doors are simply asking for trouble. The trusting attitude they have is an invitation to criminals. There is always someone who might not even have a criminal mentality who is looking for just such an opportunity to take advantage of people who feel so secure they don't think about having to lock their doors. And they don't lose any sleep trying to remember if they did or they didn't do it.
I can guarantee that there are some people who would not want to live in such a place. It seems to me that such people have become defined by their insecurity. It has shaped their politics and their world-view. When they look around them and notice how many people don't look like them and don't share their ethnic history, whose ancestors came from a different place, who perhaps worship a strange god, worship in a strange church that probably isn't called a church - they feel threatened, as if their way of life were under siege and their country were no longer the exclusive property of people like them. And politicians have become expert at capitalizing on their insecurity. Rather than trying to assuage it, they exacerbate it. And Fox News fans their hate. Turn on Fox News any day and they will feature a story about an "illegal" committing some egregious crime against an American citizen.
We have all grown unnaturally paranoid about the tiniest things. Driving to work in the mornings, did we remember to turn off the iron? The thought that, if we didn't, we might return home to a pile of ashes that was our house gets under our skin. But we can't turn around and go back every time such a thought occurs to us when we drive away from our homes. So we adapt. We no longer react to our paranoia, as justified as it may it be. We adapt to the risks. We have to. Otherwise we would never accomplish anything. Think about the McAlister family, who, going through the exhaustive details of their Christmas vacation away from home, left behind their youngest child twice. They had the feeling that they forgot something, but they can't figure out what it was until it's too late. This is why Murphy's Law was invented. To drive us all crazy. I once worked as a security guard in a complex of medical office buildings, and after I was trained about all the little insignificant things I had to check to make sure nothing went wrong, and after doing it for a number of weeks, I understood that there is no such thing as Murphy's Law. Because if all the things that could go wrong did go wrong, the world would fly to pieces.
And I will admit that, though I have never felt unsafe in my apartment and I never lost any sleep because of noises I might have mistaken for burglars, if I was the second man I described above and I felt that I needed to buy a lethal weapon and keep it within reach just so I would feel more secure, I would move. And if I lived in a country where politicians and pundits had convinced me that the best thing in the world to insure a good night's sleep for me was a 2,000 mile wall on the border with Mexico, I would migrate to Canada.
So on the last day of 2018, a year to which I was not especially attached (it made me 60, after all), I will kiss my nearest (if not my dearest) at the stroke of midnight, turn off the lights, lock my front door, and sleep soundly, rising to pee only two or three times. The world is full of strangers.
Happy New Year.
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