Smiling From a "Dangerous World"
My American friends are always worried about MY safety.... how ironic
I’m sitting here in Egypt, and my phone starts buzzing with "concerns." It’s usually someone from back home asking if I’m "staying safe" over here in the "third world."
I just smile.
I smile because the average American has been sold a bill of goods. We’ve been brainwashed to think we live in the only "safe" spot on the map, but for most of us, that just means we’re free to get carjacked at a gas station while the rest of the world watches in horror. We look at "developing" nations with this smug, misplaced pity while our own zip codes are turning into open-air morgues.
Let’s look at the numbers, because numbers don't give a damn about your "American Pride."
The "War Zone" Next Door
If you live in St. Louis, you’re living in a city with a homicide rate that has touched 60 per 100,000 residents. Now, let's look at Kigali, Rwanda. Yeah, that Rwanda. The place you probably only know from a movie about a genocide thirty years ago. Kigali is a massive, bustling city, and its homicide rate is roughly 2 per 100,000.
Do the math: You are 30 times more likely to get clipped in the "Gateway to the West" than you are in the heart of East Africa. Who’s living in the "primitive" country now?
The Cartel Myth
Americans hear "Colombia" and they think Narcos. They think machine guns and cocaine kings. But look at Medellín. They got tired of the violence and actually cleaned house. Today, Medellín’s homicide rate is about 14 per 100,000.
Compare that to Baltimore, where the rate is closer to 50. You’re nearly four times safer walking through the hills of a former cartel capital than you are walking to a ballgame in Maryland. If you told a guy in a Baltimore bar that he’d be safer in Colombia, he’d call you a liar—right before he checked to make sure his truck windows weren't smashed.
The Car Theft Capital vs. The "Commies"
Look at Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a beautiful place, if you don't mind your vehicle disappearing the second you turn your back. They have some of the highest property crime and vehicle theft rates in the country.
Now look at Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam is a "communist, developing nation," right? That’s what the textbooks tell us. But in Hanoi, a city of over 5 million people, you can walk down a dark alley at 3:00 AM with your phone out and not feel a bead of sweat on your neck. In Albuquerque, you don't even leave a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard unless you want a shattered window and a police report that nobody’s ever going to read.
The Reality Check
We’ve been conditioned to think that safety is a luxury only America can provide. But we’re the ones with metal detectors in the high schools. We’re the ones with "active shooter" drills for six-year-olds.
São Paulo, Brazil has 23 million people and a homicide rate of 5 per 100,000.
Memphis, Tennessee has 630,000 people and a violent crime rate of 2,500 per 100,000.
If you think size is the problem, explain how a city the size of a small country in South America is safer than a mid-sized town in Tennessee. It’s not about size; it’s about a total collapse of the social fabric that we’re too arrogant to acknowledge.
So, when people ask if I’m safe out here in the "wilds" of the world, I tell them the truth: I feel a hell of a lot safer here than I do back in the "civilized" world. I’m not the one living in a fortress of my own making. I’m the one who finally figured out that the walls we built to keep the "dangerous" world out are actually the ones keeping us trapped in a house that’s already on fire.
Oh yeah and we're still shooting our children in the face at schools in America.
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