It has crept up on me how many people no longer say Farewell, So Long, or Goodbye. Goodbye is supposedly a shortening of God Be With Ye. In Spanish they used to say Vaya Con Dios, go with God. Now the world says Be Safe. What's with that? I am suspicious that their real message is Be Afraid.
It is ironic that I would be suspicious of 'Be Safe' because I have always been a bit of a safety nerd. Shop class in high school gets the credit for this. Working around all those tools required safety lectures to inherently reckless teenage boys. But I didn't resent the emphasis on safety, even at that age. In fact I adopted the idea that injuries are merely unprofessional and should be looked down on.
Once an attitude like that is adopted, it can be applied to many important activities in life, with driving a car being the most obvious. I was a "roadie" bicyclist for many years and never had a serious injury. So many cyclists did get hurt.
Lately the Twitter Files have exposed the nerve center of the censorship program as the "Department of Trust and Safety." Ahh dear, that magic word again.
The classic example from the history of leftist authoritarianism is the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The nerve center of that atrocity was the Committee of Public Safety.
Society has been naive by letting itself get sucked into safety-worship. "Safety" is a word that can be slowly expanded until it restricts and controls anything and everything. Some people are shocked that roughly half of the Land of the Free and the Brave no longer believes in free speech. How did this happen?
It did not happen through a direct frontal attack against the Bill of Rights. It happened through the back door: the slow development of the safety cult and safety regulations, until speech and thought can be controlled in the name of Safety.
I can't resist an anecdote about the religiosity of the modern safety cult. Almost 60 years ago my religious grandmother was talking to a friend of hers, whose son was driving his car in the mountains of Colorado. She hadn't heard from him for a couple days and was sure that he had driven off the side of a mountain. These two women were literally hysterical, screaming for Jesus and all that. An entire college degree in theology would not have been more educational than that.
Formal religions don't have a monopoly over Fear and Hope. The State has moved into that ground now that religion has receded from our culture. Fear of unemployment, injuries, health problems, the Virus, global warming, racism, the Russkies, Fascists. There is one bogeyman after another who is out there, hiding behind a bush, and is looking for a chance to "gitchoo," The only way for you to be SAAAAAAAFE is to submit to the authority of the elites.
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