Bubblewrap and Hand Sanitizer

There are mad, murderous, motherfucking bombers on the loose, whole towns in Texas are being swallowed by literally earth-shaking balls of fire and, as I'm typing this, some whole different motherfucker appears to be shooting up MIT. My two immediate impressions: 1) thank god for Boston's reputation for resiliency. Whether it was warranted or not, we found it out this week. You had to sit through almost a whole century of a really shitty baseball team, one president you got elected got shot, the other candidates you sent were disasters of an arguably similar scale... things have been bad before. We had our suspicions about what you could do and luckily we were largely proved right. And 2) we are the safest any humans have been, ever.

It's not an obvious takeaway, I get that. But episodes like this past week always serve to remind me what delicate, puncturable bags of meat and soup we actually are. Compared to every other carnivore, we are furless, toothless, declawed, nose-blind, voiceless, cowering babies. Our vast and vaunted intellect has afforded us the self-awareness and internal-resource-deficiency to render us capable of actually being scared to death. Like, literally. Think about that really: on the one hand, I've watched a female lion single-handedly attack a full-grown bull elephant. Did she win? Of course not. But that only happens if you lack the ability to be murdered by the thought of being confronted by something that may threaten you. Intellect? Yes. Superior? Eh...

All of modern western civilization, the United States in particular, is drawn up around you like a coccoon, a chrysalis from which no butterfly is ever intended to emerge. And why would we want to? We've got really good 4G signal coverage and delivery Indian food up in this bitch. And what's out there for an adolescent lepidopteran anyway? Flying? Who can think of a less safe thing to do?

Well, unless you're an American flying in an airplane. Harm from that is something that, if you consider death/injury vs. the number of people who have flown, has never actually happened from a statistical point of view.

We have underground sewage systems and treatment plants to protect us from even the invisible things that are gross and hide in our poo. And other invisible things we combat with a staggering array of vaccines or antibiotics to defeat pathogens that have loomed eternally over our ancestors, as endemic as death itself. Unless you're a self-promoting science-deaf shrieking contrarian like Jenny McCarthy, in which case, I'm happy to see you take your chances.

We have clean, stable sources of drinking water only tainted by things we choose to taint it with, thank you very much.

We're maybe the first human society to enjoy its entire existence among an embarrassing harvest of perpetual plenty of food.* In fact, our primary food related danger is that we are getting so much of it so quickly and in so much variety that it's killing us with diabetes and heart disease. This in America is what constitutes a problem.

Lots of people die in car accidents, sure. But we have vehicles at our beck and call, capable of traveling at what until incredibly recently in history would have been an unthinkable rate of speed, on the best road system in the world to a) speed us away from dangers b) take us to help after we have experienced danger or c) bring help to us to combat danger, probably called by the supercomputer we routinely keep in our pockets. Sometimes it takes an ambulance or police a half hour to get there after you call 911, but come on, people you don't know will risk their own lives driving like maniacs to come and save yours. And they wait around all day just to get a chance to come and do that.

Right now, in space, there are eyes watching, all across the visible and invisible spectrum of light, sound, radiation and probably feelings, every border and every sea approach to every shore we claim. The likelihood of being murdered in your sleep in your burning-down village by Viking marauders approaches zero.**

Similar satellites are also dedicated solely to warn you days in advance if maybe you could get rained on.

It's gotten to the point that we are, relatively speaking, so unequivocally safe that our main threat of harm comes from plots and schemes of other men. We have become so willfully, mercifully, miraculously disengaged from the Hobbesian state of nature that we are inventing ways to inflict it on one another.

But that passes, too. Or at least it has so far. It might not always. But nuclear holocaust or global warming would be our fault as well.*** Sort of a last-ditch parting shot at the vulgar, undigified and mortifying alternate prospects of "natural" deaths by swarms of locusts or gross old age. Just a collective: "you know what, God? We'll just do this ourselves." Then boom! Or glub. Or whatever. Middle finger the last thing the rising seas swallow.

This didn't all come to me after Boston or Texas or any other searing trauma. Most of this happened while I was locked in an aluminum cylinder with 200 other humans barrelling forward at 600 miles per hour six miles above the earth on my way home from the Midwest. How comfortable must I have been to even have considered something so reckless? Flying is for birds. Or butterflies. At least the ones too stupid to realize when they've got it so good.



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*Still not awesome at figuring out how to distribute it right, I will grant you that, but hey! Come on! Who else has ever had to do this?

**You hear me, Norway. Back the fuck off.

***OK, not everyone agrees about the latter being man-made. When the Rapture comes and leaves the rest of us rational dummies behind, you can all have a good laugh at us from your clouds. Enjoy your eternal harp music. I'm going to take my chances.