Are We Safe?

Being Safe is Different from Feeling Safe

Ask yourself, “Do I feel safe right now?” Follow up with “Am I safe at this moment?”

This pair of twin questions yields surprising answers — twin windows into the heart of a society in motion, a society turning itself over like stones at low tide to see what is living underneath. I think of feeling safe this way: Safety is the felt experience that my body can rest, my needs can be met, my truth can be spoken, my boundaries will be honored, my people will not abandon me, and tomorrow is possible — a small lit room inside the chest that stays warm when the world outside is cold.

While many people may quibble that if you are physically safe, you should feel safe, I haven’t found that to be true. Being physically safe is only part of the equation. Here’s where “feeling safe” becomes a window into the soul of our society today — and where it offers clues to how we might find our way back.

We are over-exposed to stimuli through our devices, and especially over-exposed to stories of people being harmed. News arrives like water through a cracked ceiling: steady, relentless, seeping into every room.

Can we rest? Too much stimuli means it is harder to rest our bodies. Our minds spin in the dark like a wheel that has forgotten how to stop. The less we sleep, the more we scroll. The more we scroll, the less we sleep. And on it goes — a tide that rises just enough to keep us from reaching dry ground.

Everywhere around us, politicians and journalists are highlighting stories about rising food, fuel, and housing costs. Their motive may be compassion, or the hunger to be heard, or the simple mechanics of what draws eyes to a screen. But the effect is the same: they steal our belief that our needs can or will be met. We come away from these stories like travelers who have read too many accounts of a road’s dangers and can no longer remember why they wanted to make the journey.

We’ve seen stories about people being punished for speaking up. A friend of mine was denied entry into India because of her social media posts criticizing authoritarians. She was put on the next plane home. Our Freedom of Speech seems less sacred when we feel the invisible hand on our shoulder, the unspoken warning: be careful what you say. Lawsuits against media companies and journalists trace the outlines of a shrinking room.

Over the past eighteen months, the footage has multiplied — people snatched mid-stride from sidewalks, protesters scattered like leaves before a storm, bodies dragged into unmarked vehicles. When we witness this, whether in person or through a glowing screen at midnight, our nervous system does not distinguish between watching and experiencing. The body registers a threat all the same. We learn, at the cellular level, that our edges can be crossed.

Many of us have lost friends or family over politics, over opinion, over something said at a dinner table that could not be unsaid. The people we loved have become strangers, and we have become strangers to them. We are learning, against our will, the sound of a door closing. This is perhaps the deepest wound of all — not the fear of government, but the disappearance of belonging, the slow hollowing out of the rooms where we used to feel known.

No wonder depression and anxiety are rising like floodwater. What is imaginable for tomorrow in a world where we cannot feel the ground beneath our feet? And can we take positive action to restore safety — not just for ourselves, but for the whole ecosystem of people we share this moment with?

We begin by telling the truth about safety. We cannot scold people into feeling safe. The nervous system is not a child who misbehaves — it is a watchman who has been at his post too long, reading smoke where there is none, because once there was fire. We cannot shame it into calmness. We cannot command trust where trust has been broken, any more than we can demand a cracked vessel hold water.

Feeling safe is not a character attribute or a political strength. It is a bodily, relational, and civic condition — the accumulated weight of ten thousand small signals that say you belong here, you are not alone, the ground will hold.

And that means safety can be rebuilt.

Not all at once. Not by one election, one court case, one protest, one spiritual practice, or one conversation across difference. But layer by layer, the way a reef is built — fragment by fragment, year by year, each small creature adding its structure to the whole until something strong enough for other life to cling to has emerged.

If our bodies cannot rest, then part of the work is to reduce the flood. We can choose when and how we consume news. We can turn off autoplay and stop carrying the whole world’s suffering into bed with us like stones in our pockets. This is not avoidance. It is stewardship. A body kept in constant alarm eventually loses its capacity for wise action — it becomes like a compass near a magnet, spinning uselessly, unable to find true north.

If our needs feel threatened, then another part of the work is mutual care. Food pantries, community fridges, childcare circles, housing support, emergency funds, neighborhood check-ins, local organizing — these are not small acts. They are how people remember: I am not alone. My needs matter. Your needs matter. We can hold one another. Each one of us is a thread in a net we are weaving together.

If our truth feels dangerous, then we must practice speaking with both courage and care. Not every thought needs to be posted. Not every fear needs to become a public performance. But silence born of terror is not peace — it is a field left fallow by frost. We need trusted rooms where people can say what they actually think, listen without judgement, and repair when harm is done.

If our boundaries have been violated, then we must restore the sacredness of limits. In our homes, workplaces, faith communities, movements, and public life, we need to remember that power without restraint threatens us all. Safety grows when people know where the lines are, who will protect them, and what happens when those lines are crossed.

If abandonment has become our habit, then rebuilding safety requires the slow work of staying. Not staying in abuse or in relationships that require self-betrayal. But staying present to people who are scared, grieving, defensive, confused, or different from us — the way a lighthouse stays present to a ship it cannot see, sending its signal into the dark regardless. We have become practiced at cutting each other off. We need to become practiced at returning, repairing, rehumanizing.

And if tomorrow no longer feels possible, then we must become people who make tomorrow visible again.

That may be the most important work of all.

A society that does not feel safe cannot imagine well. It can only defend, hoard, accuse, punish, and retreat — a city shuttered against a storm that has already passed. But a society that begins to feel safe enough can tell a different story. It can ask better questions. It can build better systems. It can prepare rather than panic. It can disagree without destruction. It can protect the vulnerable without manufacturing enemies. The community can remember that the future is not a distant country we are waiting to reach. It is something we practice into being, the way a path is made by walking.

So maybe the question is not only, “Are we safe?”

Maybe the deeper question is: What would help us become safe enough to be brave?

Safe enough to tell the truth. Safe enough to rest. Safe enough to organize. Safe enough to listen. Safe enough to protect one another. Safe enough to imagine tomorrow.

Because feeling safe again will not come from turning away from danger. It will come from facing danger together — with bodies that have learned to breathe again, with speech that does not flinch from what is real, with relationships strong enough to bear the weight of honesty, and with communities that can hold fear in their hands without being ruled by it. Like a hand cupped around a flame in the wind: sheltering the small light, staying close, keeping it alive.