The Real Cost of Safety

Over the years I have experienced the growing need to focus on personal safety first hand, as our society changed and desperation increased. As personal mobility became less of a challenge, safety issues have expanded, even to the most remote areas.

I vividly remember being attacked and stabbed by a burglar in my family home, back in 1985, in Sans Soucis, so I guess even the 'good old days' over 33 years ago, was already unsafe in many ways, and I still have the scars to show.

Today however it's about frequency.. ..and it appears that the community has accepted the daily news reports of attacks as a normal part of the development process. Today, no crime is too extraordinary to shock the society and no one is surprised at anything anymore. The 'numbness' has set in, and it appears that we are all just content to keep scores of the monthly crime totals and hope it never reaches our homes.

Back in the days, it was sufficient to line your perimeter with glass bottled walls. This trend had become the natural finish to residential garden walls,.... that false sense of security from small pieces of glass cemented in the motar. Not long afterwards, we were adding accents of barbed wire to the crest of the walls, shaking our fists that the walls were too low.

However this was only the beginning of the isolation, as the crime grew, we fell back to encarserating ourselves into our homes, with rebar steel, .....welded into aesthetically acceptable patterns. Now we would be safe. But we were not.

Even as we made bigger gates, bought bigger dogs and larger locks, to secure us within our walls... we still could not feel safe.

So, we slowly moved out of the urban areas to the suburbs... but still the crime followed.....like a bad cold it changed and evolved went we went.