safe, part 2

Every once in a while it occurs to me that there are things that I do not worry about, in my safe suburban North American life. Today, for example, I was sitting in my car after dark, in a parking lot. The door was unlocked. I was looking for something in my bag when suddenly I realized that I was not worried.

I was not worried.

Ok, maybe I should have been worried.

But I wasn't.

People in this country worry so much about crime, about those isolated incidents that they read about in the paper (exceptions made if you actually live in a place with frequent, violent, stranger-to-stranger crime), but I am more and more struck by how safe people's lives are here.

We were talking about roadblocks, earlier, and I said, "Sometimes it still surprises me how long you can drive in this country without being stopped at a roadblock."

"Yeah," the other person joked, "it's been a while since you had an AK-47 stuck in your face, huh?"

I've never actually had an AK-47 stuck in my face. But the general idea, yes. It's been a while since someone with a big gun stood in front of my car and made me stop to answer his questions.

It feels weirder that it's been a while than it ever did to stop at roadblocks on a regular basis.