Some Thoughts About Being Safe

Dennis Prager May 19, 2020

In a recent “Fireside Chat,” my weekly talk show on the PragerU platform, I commented on society’s increasing fixation on being “safe.” The following is a condensed version of what I said:
 We have a meme up at PragerU: “‘Until it’s safe’ means ‘never.’“

The pursuit of “safe” over virtually all other considerations i life-suppressing. This is true for your own individual life, and it is true for the life of a society.

I always give the following example: I have been taking visitors to Israel for decades, and for all those decades, people have called my radio show to say, “Dennis, I would so love to visit Israel, but I’m just going to wait until it’s safe.” And I’ve always told these people, “Then you’ll never go.” And sure enough, I’ve gone there over 20 times, and they never went.

I have never led my life on the basis of “until it’s safe.” I do not take ridiculous risks. I wear a seatbelt whenever I’m in a car because the chances are overwhelming that in a bad accident, a seatbelt can save my life. But I get into the car, which is not 100 percent safe...........To Read More....

My Take - This insistence on everything being safe is one of the constants in leftist arguments.  In this case it's a variation of the Precautionary Principle: if something isn't proven safe it can't be used.   There's only one problem with that. Nothing is safe!  Everything is unsafe at some level, and you can't prove things are safe, you can only prove things are unsafe.  It's called proving a negative, and it's impossible.

As an example.

Ask a room full of people if they're married, and to put their hands up if they are, and keep them up.  Then ask them if they're cheating on their spouse.  Every one of those hands will go down...at least in a normal crowd of people.  Then say to them:  I don't believe you! Prove to me you aren't cheating!  They can't. You can only prove what people are doing, not what they're not doing.