I saw a column about safety

Context
Monica Carter Tagore is a columnist for The Shreveport Times. Today is Saturday. In Friday's column she discussed some "how to stay safe" responses to a couple of recent incidents in the area.

Commentary
Even though Monica is my favorite columnist in the Times, I don't read the paper religiously enough to catch everything she writes. In fact, I was only reading the Friday paper today because it's my husband's (and dog's) job to get the morning paper and he wasn't up yet. I'm glad to be able to show you the column on the Internet, because the newspaper version had a somewhat nonsensical title.

The reason I like Ms. Tagore's columns so much is not because I always agree with them, but because they're almost always thought provoking. I didn't agree with her definitions of "common sense" and "smarts" today, nor with her solution to the "kid in peril" situation (I never think fear-mongering is a good way to promote safety), but reading the column did set me to thinking about safety in general.

I'm often troubled by how we approach this issue, especially our inclination to look to "preventing bad things" as the solution to society's ills. Don't get me wrong; some forms of prevention are wonderful (life without smallpox vaccines, anyone? I didn't think so.). But I think there are at least three things we need to consider when assessing the value of preventative medicine for a given situation:

1) Nothing will make you 100% safe.

Law enforcement,, popular culture and urban legend tell us that if someone is really determined to steal from us, they will find a way. Even God is not particularly impressed with our efforts to protect ourselves from loss.

2) Sometimes our instinct to just prevent bad things from happening keeps us from better long-term solutions.

I live in Louisiana. I'm nowhere near New Orleans and Shreveport got only one really rainy day out of Rita, but the "how to prevent hurricane damage" debate has an impact statewide on politics and economics.

In middle school I learned that levees are a pretty dicey form of flood prevention, because a body of water that is not permitted to flood occasionally will continually build up silt on its bed. So the water level keeps getting higher and you have to keep building bigger levees. If you do that all around a city over several decades, you end up with a city that's essentially surrounded by levee-walls. When the water finally does wash over, which it will because nothing makes you 100% safe, it's almost impossible to remove. That, in case you were puzzled about it, is what happened to New Orleans.

3) Sometimes it's better go through a bad thing and come out on the other side than to prevent it.

In the Bible, two people avoid death completely: Enoch and Elijah (Tip 'o the hat to Shygost, my husband's Go teacher for reminding me of this fact.). And Enoch and Elijah are obviously two of God's favorite people. But God Himself, in the form of Jesus, did not avoid death. He died and rose again, all for the purpose of ending the sting of death forever.

As a beneficiary, I think this was by far the better result. Frankly, knowing I have a God like that makes me feel pretty darn safe under any circumstances.

What did you see today?