Thread by @NancyRomm

I had dinner last week with a friend who said she’d noticed something consistent with the protesters, no matter what part of the country they were in.

“They do things like stand in front of someone’s car and, when the car tries to move, claim they’re about to be run over,” she said. “They basically put themselves in danger and then make you responsible for keeping them safe.”

She referred to this phenomenon as safetyism, an idea introduced in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, which described the concept as a “cult of safety… [that] deprived young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need,…

…thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.”

Though I’d read Coddling, I did not specifically recall the concept, and I did not, perhaps, both because it’s become the water we swim in, and because whatever defensive posture it once imagined for itself has long since gone on the offensive.

I thought of this earlier today when I came across a letter written by a reporter at a Portland newspaper, claiming the “publication of mug shots and personal information of people who have been arrested and charged with crimes at protests” was putting the arrestees in danger.

Leaving aside that mug shots are part of the public record and easily found online, I wondered how those committing the crimes had, just like that, been recast in the role of victim. I wondered whether they’d heard the old saw, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

If it were true, as the reporter cited, that “one of the people [her paper had interviewed] has since left the state for fear of his safety,” I wondered whether he actually were afraid or whether proclamations of fear was the ante currently required, the dumpster fire you set…

…exonerated not by remorse but a public quailing, or an apparent quailing, in the face of repercussions.

*Hey, wait a second,* I imagine some people saying. *Publishing someone’s photo and personal information seems a little out of bounds.* I agree.

You may have noticed I have not linked certain details here. I try to keep the work on point, and unless I’m reporting a story and citing facts, I don’t see the mileage in plastering people’s photos online.

Is it the case that journalists at established and independent outlets put old pictures of me online, citing how my work puts people in danger (or that I’m a hack)? Sure. The same claim was recently made by an editor, who said my reporting jeopardized his reporter.

It’s all-danger, all-the-time out here, one difference I see being: I have never felt in danger, not when activists stole my phone, or roughed me up, or said they had eyes on me, or when in the past I’ve gotten death threats.

And about those last: they’re really not scary, made as they are almost always by people who don’t have the stones or the skills to come at you with their complaint, to engage in discussion; they hide inside their anonymity, inside their riot gear.

Things have been quiet for the past few days in Portland. Part of why, are the horrific fires engulfing much of the west coast, including more than a million acres in Oregon. The air is gross and dank and ominous.

Portlanders have been advised to stay indoors and all public parks have been closed. These factors have slowed the peaceful and not-peaceful actions the city has seen for 108 days straight.

With untold number of homes in danger, maybe young people are taking a break from saving the world save their family’s possessions. Maybe they’ll become less afraid when called upon to handle that which is unquestionably unsafe.