Objectively measuring risk

We live in a country today that places a high value on promoting safety and minimizing everyday risks. One needs to go no further than to notice all the safety warnings one encounters on a typical day (my favorite is the beep that in a car that rings every minute if the driver is not wearing a seat belt) to know that Americans want to be protected from all kinds of threats, real and imagined. Several events this past week reminded me of this and made me think about just how realistic of a goal this is.

 

Last Friday, there an accident on Interstate 40. Two vehicles collided, causing a nearby tractor-trailer to cross the median and slam onto oncoming traffic. The resulting explosion killed one driver and caused a fire that took hours to put out. My first reaction to the news was about the driver who was killed and whether he could have taken any safety precaution to prevent him from getting burnt alive. I thought of the same thing last night when I watched the news about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

 

These events are tragic but they give us valuable lessons. My main takeaway is that as much as we love life and want to enjoy it to the fullest, we are unable to completely control all the circumstances surrounding us. Additional airbags could not have saved that driver on Interstate 40. If that caravan of vehicles that crossed over the Mississippi River had been traveling with the President and had been given a Secret Service detail, it still would have ended up falling into the river.

 

Life is often too short and should definitely be preserved and protected. But our efforts toward that goal should be tempered with the understanding that it is packaged with a degree of systematic risk that we cannot control over. I feel that many in our society do not understand this and try to work as hard as possible to mitigate every possible threat to our longevity, regardless of how remote. I see this in some of the laws that many state legislatures have considered, such as those that prohibit drivers from talking on the phone while operating a vehicle or those that prohibit restaurant owners from allowing their customers to use tobacco. The reasoning behind these laws is that if there is a remote chance that someone can do something that may harm someone else, that possibility should be eliminated. We have become risk averse. 

 

A friend once said that we have become risk averse because our culture has become secular. His reasoning is when a people stop believing in a hereafter, their goal changes from pleasing their maker to maximizing their secular existence. I agree that secularism is a culprit but think it has nothing to do with maximizing our longevities. Rather, I think secularism makes us more confident in our ability to control every minute aspect of our lives and less reliant on trusting an almighty God to provide for our safety. We fail to realize that our ability to protect ourselves pales in comparison to God’s sovereignty.

 

 

On ABC World News last night there was a woman who talked exactly about relying on God for protection. Monica Segura is a camp counselor who was aboard a school bus full of children when it was caught on a falling portion of I-35.

 

“Thank God that He was there with us, protecting us, and he didn’t let us be a little bit back more (or) a little bit forward more. He had us right there in that spot.”

 

Sounds like this teenager understands risk much better than many adults I know.