Open thread: a place of greater safety
What does feeling safe mean to you?
This weekend, I was lucky enough to be invited on a retreat with a number of former strangers who work in media, political and creative fields. It was billed as a space where ideas could be exchanged freely, and disagreements had- and they they have been, not least because of the sense of being physically removed from the frenetic machine of a city running on cortisol and smog.
It has been a gift to be here. I have made friends and learned things. If the concept had not become so tainted, I would call it….well, a ‘safe space’. We are safe here. Or are we?
The retreat is happening in a beautiful and remote part of Wales, in a small old hotel surrounded by woods. The countryside smells of cold water and woodsmoke and getting here took five hours, three changes of train and a car ride down dark and winding country road. The staff appears to consist entirely of five competent red-headed teenagers. And there’s almost no internet.
Cool. Cool cool cool cool…..
On the second night, there was a terrible storm. Trees came down, cutting us off from the roads. One of our number was headed to the airport early when a live cable came down on her car- thankfully, she’s alright. Tonight, there’s been news of a frightening new COVID variant, and the fear of being confined to our homes again, or worse.
There’s a now-familiar sense of being suspended outside time, barrelling towards an unknown future.
It is, in short, the perfect setting for a trashy horror movie. If it does all go a bit Midsommar after this last night, I want to say to long-term readers that it’s been a privilege to be part of your lives over these years.
But just in case we do make it, I want to ask what you all think about safety.
Everyone, it seems, wants to feel safe, or be assured of the safety of those they love. The more frightening the world gets the more we long to feel that way. But there’s shame around that feeling, too, as if it were the special concern of the US military industrial complex, spoilt children, and liberal arts students with the temerity to have pronouns.
I want to ask what safety means to you. What it takes for you to feel safe- and how important it is. Do you think you deserve safety? How much of it? What should and shouldn’t it mean? When in your life and with whom have you felt safest- and when you imagine safety, what does it look like?
I have been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently saw someone local tweet about how people “didn’t feel safe” due to unhoused people in a community. And it really struck me how safety is predominately used by people who are already the safest - those who have the most, as a bludgeon to further marginalize those whose lives are truly less safe.
This trend is particularly clear with cis woman transphobes bleating about how sharing spaces with women who are much more vulnerable and marginalized than them makes them feel “unsafe.”
This feeling of unsafety from the rich and privileged can never be addressed because it is lodged in stereotypes and phobias - not based in any kind of reality.
What truly makes us unsafe? Cars. Cars are dangerous! They are what is most likely to kill any of us randomly, regardless of our underlying health. Climate change threatens our whole society. Income inequality is leaving people without the basic resources they need to be unsafe.
And yet, when we hear about safety it’s almost invariably people scared of trans people or poor people or other folks who have been marginalized. Funny that.
Safety is where you don't have to use energy on survival or vigilance, and can instead use that focus on growth.