Mt. Cutler
About 12 years ago, I went on a date with a beautiful brunette. I was super stoked because she picked what we were going to do. She lived in Colorado Springs and she wanted to take me on one of her favorite hikes.
I lived in Denver at the time, so the plan was for me to drive down, pick her up, swing by Subway, grab some food, and make the hike. The ultimate goal was to get to the overlook at Seven Falls and watch the sunset and the falls get lit up.
The night started uneventfully; things went smoothly. I made the drive down from Denver. I picked her up. We stopped and grabbed some sandwiches from Subway, drove to the Trailhead, tossed the sandwiches in my backpack, and made the mile hike to the overlook.
So far, this evening is going awesome. I’m with a beautiful woman in a romantic setting that she picked.
I spent my teen years in the mountains in Colorado. I know how dangerous and unforgiving nature can be. But that night, I was about to experience that in a new way.
Fear | Danger | Safety | Security
Fear / Safety | Danger / Security
What rules your life?
I was in Navy boot camp when 9/11 happened. One of the things that was really interesting for me to observe and was a really harsh indicator of how much the world had changed was the difference in airport security from when I flew out versus the difference in airport security from when I was flying to my first training station.
Navy boot camp is in Chicago and I flew from Albuquerque to Chicago. When I left, if someone could make it through the metal detectors, they could walk right up to the gate and wave goodbye as your plane pulled out. When I got out of boot camp for my flight from Chicago to Charleston, South Carolina, there were armed guards everywhere, heightened security.
The security measures have only gotten more intense since then, although the armed guards have toned down a little bit. Now we have the full body scanners, taking off shoes and belts and stuff, and putting all kinds of stuff through x-ray machines. It didn’t used to be that way.
I’m not trying to comment on the efficacy of airport security. That’s another video for another time. I’m pointing out that airport security had modified how they were executing their mission. They’d implemented extra measures.
When you get right down to it, the purpose of airport security is to prevent bad people from getting access to airplanes. And failing that is to prevent bad people from getting access to airplanes with something that will allow them to do bad things with that airplane.
What is security?
The simple definition is it is the prevention and mitigation of external threats.
In the very near past, my wife and I had the opportunity to attend a skillet concert in Denver. At the event, there were ostensibly people manning metal detectors. One thing I noticed is as we went through, the sensitivity on the metal detectors was cranked way down.
I get why they do that. They don’t want to make getting into the venue hugely cumbersome. But the reality is that when the sensitivity is turned down that low, it’s not difficult for someone to sneak a weapon into that venue. They probably couldn’t have gotten a firearm in, but a knife or something else similar would not have been tremendously difficult. On top of that security was focused on people inside the venue. We had to park down the street and walk to the venue. There was no security for us while we were in transit.
Were they actually providing security?
In a really, really loose sense, yeah. But what they were really there for was to provide a sense of safety. If you’re saying it’s not security, but safety…
What is safety?
The term safety is really, really overused and it can get conflated with the term security really, really easily. Because of that, the meaning of the term is hugely dependent on context. When it’s used synonymously with security, you can apply the definition of security: it is the prevention and mitigation of external threats. When it’s not used in the context of security, it usually means a sense of assurance or the perception of protection.
So now that we’ve established some definitions…
What are the differences between safety and security?
Safety is the feeling we get from security. It’s an emotional response. And because it’s an emotional response, safety has an irrational component. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing; it’s just the fact of what it is.
All of us crave safety. We all behave in ways that seek safety, seek that sense of protection. And truthfully, any departure from a safety seeking behavior happens for one of two reasons, either necessity or enjoyment.
An example of departure from safety seeking behavior would be a paratrooper – a soldier who gets on an airplane, straps on a parachute, jumps out of that perfectly good airplane, drifts to the ground, and then goes and fights people. There is a bunch of things that that person has decided to do that are decidedly not safe. But they’ve made that decision because accomplishing their mission requires it. It is a necessity.
On the enjoyment end of the spectrum, pick pretty much any extreme sport, including skydiving for recreational purposes. I’m not casting shade. When I was younger, I snowboarded. I would like to get back to whenever time and money allow.
Is it safety or security?
How do we tell the difference?
First, are the measures taken targeting specific actions or threats? Second (and probably more important), are the actions that we are attempting to prevent actually preventable? And lastly, are the measures being implemented? Are the limitations to those measures understood and accepted? The difference does matter.
I spent most of my life as an electrical technician, so I like to use electrical analogies because it’s me.
In residential neighborhoods, it’s really common to see big green boxes that hum around houses or apartment complexes or whatever. Those are transformers. If someone were to access the internals of those transformers and touch the electrical bits while they’re energized, they would most certainly die.
There’s two main ways that electrical hazards are addressed. Usually you see both of them implemented in some way, but we’re going to examine each individually. One is to put a lock on it or to otherwise prevent someone from physically getting inside whatever you’re trying to prevent them from getting into. The other is to put a sticker on there that in some way, shape, or form tells them that if you get inside here, you’re probably going to get either hurt really badly or you’re going to die.
The example of physically securing the cabinet, the transformer, or whatever is an example of security. You’re taking a tangible measure to prevent someone from completing an action, opening that equipment, and getting access to the internals.
On the other hand, the sticker is an example of safety. If there were no other measures in place, it would just be a psychological barrier. They’re just the emotional component and the fear that that sticker would create to prevent the action. From the perspective of the person who’s in charge of making sure unauthorized people don’t get in there, using just a sticker makes them feel good because they’ve checked that box and said, “Yes, I’ve done my diligence to prevent someone from getting in here.” When all they’ve done is put some words on the box.
Why does the difference matter?
We’ve already said that safety is the pursuit of an emotional and a rational goal. By definition, when you are pursuing an irrational goal, you must (to some extent) put rationality aside. And when we pursue that irrational goal and we at least somewhat jettison rationality, we wind up often taking actions that are detrimental to us, either short term or usually long term, chasing something that cannot be achieved.
True safety is not something that can be obtained.
I’ve got a couple of chainsaws in my garage. If you’ve ever operated a chainsaw or been around someone operating a chainsaw, you know that they can be incredibly dangerous even when operated correctly. When operated incorrectly, they are super dangerous.
Even under the best of circumstances, if you make your cut wrong, or if you hit a knot in the wood, or if there’s a nail or something in there that you didn’t know about, or if something even binds the chain, it’ll throw the bar, the bit that has the chain around it, back at you, usually at your head. To the same token, if the wood splits or breaks unexpectedly, you can wind up with the bar heading down towards your legs. All of this happens so fast, you don’t have any time to react.
Alright, so I said chainsaws are dangerous. Let’s put a little bit of meat on the bones there.
What is danger?
Danger is the objective reality of an external threat to your well-being or survival. Another example of dangers would be something like a natural disaster.
A really important concept to grasp here is danger exists regardless of our perception of it. Timmy Toddler doesn’t know that sticking a fork in a plug is dangerous.
When one of my nieces and nephews were younger, they had the opportunity to go camping with my parents outside of Chris Debut, Colorado. During part of that trip, I had the opportunity to come up and spend a couple nights camping with them. This was right at the tail end of summer, and the weather was phenomenally beautiful. It was nice during the day and it was cool, but not cold at night. The forecast was clear. It was perfect weather to sleep out under the stars, and I decided that’s what I would do.
I didn’t feel like setting up a tent. The weather was nice. I was just going to enjoy being in nature, camping out and just watching the stars at night.
If you’ve never had the chance to look at the stars at night in the mountains or somewhere where there’s no light, you should. It is amazing.
My nephew decided that he wanted to sleep outside under the stars with me. But it was interesting that as the day wore on and especially as we got into evening and started going through dinner and settling down (especially after the sunset) my nephew got more and more cautious, more and more worried.
He never really told us what was going on, but he asked if we were safe. Everyone knew that I carried a firearm with me while I was in the mountains, and he repeatedly asked if I had my gun with me. Everyone bunked down; we went to sleep; and slept through an uneventful night.
Later, we pulled the thread to figure out what was going on. It turns out my nephew was afraid of bears, and the fact that we were sleeping outside in the mountains at night, where we knew there were bears in the area, in the dark just kind of made everything worse.
I said he was afraid of bears, so…
What is fear?
Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat.
There’s two flavor of fears, rational and irrational. Rational fears are stuff that there’s actually a tangible threat to, like crossing a street and being worried that you might get hit by a car. That’s a rational fear. Most rational fears are pretty universal and a lot of them are hardwired into us.
On the other hand is irrational fear, and these are often derived from imagined or exaggerated perceptions of danger. Probably the most famous example of this is a fear of spiders. Most irrational fears are derived from experience in some way. Be it trauma, anxiety, cognitive bias, or some other trigger. Regardless, irrational fears result in a distorted perception of reality.
When that fear has a grip of you, it really messes with how you view what’s going on around you. In some ways, it can make you hyper aware of other stuff and in other cases, it can make you totally oblivious to the other stuff.
Probably most importantly is that experiencing fear is very individualized. Even though something like a fear of spiders is really common, the way each person experiences that is going to be very specific to that person. A lot of that has to do with how they came by that fear in the first place.
Like safety and security, the concepts of fear and danger intertwine. The biggest difference is that danger is tangible and fear is emotional. Both fear and safety are very individualized experiences. What makes one person afraid is not going to make another person afraid. What makes one person feel safe isn’t necessarily going to make another person feel safe.
Stung Slumber
So I’m going to use my beautiful, amazing wife as an example. Same brunette from the story that I started with. My wife HATES scorpions, and I don’t blame her at all.
We used to live in the Phoenix metro area. One night, my wife went to sleep before I did. She had drifted off, and she felt a slight stinging sensation on her leg (thought that was weird). She felt it again, and it started to burn.
She threw back the covers and turned out there was a scorpion in the bed with her. She understandably started screaming which brought me into the room full tilt. It took some time to find the little bugger. He was actually hiding under the bed. It took even longer to extract and dispatch him.
In that particular house, it was super easy for scorpions to get in. And we found them pretty frequently. Even after we moved to a different house in the metro area. It was still really easy for scorpions to get in. Basically, if you could slide a credit card through a crack, a scorpion can get inside.
And they were irritating, but it was something we could deal with. We became hyper vigilant after our son was born. And he started crawling around. A scorpion sting on an adult can be quite severe, especially the particular type of scorpions that we had. But it can be really legitimately dangerous for a small child.
The one solace I took was that it became my job to dispatch scorpions when we found them. A rubber mallet on a tile floor does an amazingly satisfying job.
Creepy Crawlies
On the flip side of the coin, my wife hates spiders. And she hates spiders. It’s super stereotypical, but whenever there’s a spider in the house, I have to be the one to dispatch it. She will do it if she knows I’m not home and I’m not going to be home for a while, but otherwise it’s on me. She’s never been bitten by a spider.
The part of Colorado that we live in has only two main species that you need to be worried about – black widows and brown recluses. As long as you’re careful, they’re really not a huge issue.
It’s not even those particular spiders that my wife is afraid of. It’s all spiders. A lot of this stems from the house that she grew up in had a bunch of spiders, especially the basement. Not particularly shocking to find spiders in basements, but she was always hyper aware of it.
Rational vs. Irrational
In both cases, my wife experiences fear. Fear is always the initial indicator that danger exists. Danger can exist without you being aware of it, but when you become aware of it, fear is that initial indicator.
In the case of our small child, that fear was an indicator of danger to our small child. In the case of spiders, the fear is the indicator of an irrational fear that my wife has. The problem is that either acting on or being prevented from action by an irrational fear can have some really serious negative consequences. They can have serious negative consequences on your overall well-being. Isolation, stress, reduced mental health.
When that sort of thing controls your life, it just kind of generally makes you miserable. Depending on the fear itself, it can cause serious damage to your relationships. It can make you mistrustful or defensive. It can cause problems with communication. And the biggest thing is that it can mess with your decision-making processes. Among other things, it can cause avoidance and missed opportunities and overreactions to a relatively benign situation.
Mt. Cutler
I said the hike up Mount Cutler started well and it did. It was a great hike up. The weather was beautiful. We got to the overlook. We had our picnic. We had a great time and we started our hike back.
On our way down the mountain, it’s after dark and I start to hear a chirping sound. I’m taking stock of the situation, realizing it’s after dark. We have one flashlight, and I have no weapons – no revolver, no knife, no nothing. I’ve got myself, a hoodie, a backpack, and the girl that I’m on the date with.
Without giving a ton of explanation, I encourage my date that we need to start moving quickly down the mountain, that it would be good for us to get back to the car. Thankfully, she accepted what I said without a whole lot of prompting, and we made it back safely. It’s worth noting that that chirp followed us almost the entire way down the mountain.
In any case, we got back to the car without incident. We sat in the car and talked for a little bit, and I finally told her what I thought that was – we were being stalked by a mountain lion. A little while later (I have no idea if they’re connected, I’ll always sort of believe that they were), we heard gunshots a little bit up the canyon from where we were parked.
How do I know if it’s a fear or a danger?
I knew there was something in the dark. I knew it was an unusual sound. I had pretty good idea of what it was. Even that by itself – a mountain lion in the mountains in Colorado – is not uncommon. Being afraid of that would have been an example of a pseudo-rational fear. Feeling fear when I realized that it was following us, that’s a rational fear because that means a 150 pound murder kitty is tracking us.
The first thing is you have to decide that you’re willing to understand the fear, which means you have to grapple with it a little bit. Once you’ve made that decision, you need to figure out is there an actual tangible threat here? If there is no tangible threat, it’s an irrational fear.
The next thing is, okay there is a tangible threat, how likely is that tangible threat to actually manifest, to come true? So, what are the risks of proceeding despite the fear? And finally, are you willing to accept the risk and move forward?
I was on a rafting trip with a group of friends when I was younger and we went up to a hole in sandstone where there was a pool. To get there, there was a cliff that we were walking by that was quite sizable, and we shimmied up a small cliff.
I have an irrational fear of heights, but at the same time there is a very real danger that if I lose my footing, things could wind up very, very badly for me. But I didn’t want to get left behind on the trail. I knew I would have fun on the other side, so pushing through that risk was worth it.
If you’re dealing with an irrational fear, if it’s not something that you can overcome by yourself, you have to get help to figure out how to push through it. Otherwise, it’s going to continue to limit you throughout your life.
The Legislature
In the 2024 legislative session of the Colorado General Assembly (that means both our Senate and House of Representatives were meeting), 12 gun control bills were proposed. Of those 12 bills, six made all the way through the legislative process and were signed by law by Governor Polis. I had the opportunity to testify before the various committees that were hearing them on seven of those bills. As gun control bills, it’s not hugely surprising that each bill dealt in some way with fear, safety, danger, security stuff.
One thing that was really interesting to me as I watched people testify and watching how the committee members asked questions of the people testifying was that on the progressive side, there was a pretty much the same crowd of people showed up every time – there was a core group of people that you could count on to always be there. On the conservative side, there was only one or two people that were consistently at the committee hearings. There was always a presence there, but it was almost always different people.
Divided Discourse
Most modern political discourse boils down to those four things: fear, danger, safety, and security. The 2024 session was no exception, and you can see it play out on the national stage. I’m sure if you go to your local county commissioners or school board meetings, the same thing is going to be in play. What’s interesting is to see how the sides approach the issues.
The left or progressives approach the issue from the fear/safety standpoint. The right or conservatives approach the issues from danger and security. And the moderates are somewhere in the middle. In this context, the moderates are usually people that don’t understand what’s really going on. Once people understand the issues, they kind of line up on one side or the other, at least in committee hearings and stuff like that.
Failure to communicate
Being able to testify in those hearings and listening to what the representatives say and the questions they asked was a real education for me. One of the big things I came away with is that on important issues (the polarizing issues, at least), the two sides pretty much talk past each other almost nonstop, and it happens in one of two ways: either the sides don’t understand each other’s viewpoint so they can’t effectively address anything in a discussion format, or (what is more common) the sides do understand each other’s standpoints and they don’t want to address it.
The sides understand their audience very well. The left uses emotion to resonate with the people that support them. (I don’t say this to be mean. It’s just what I observed) The emotional arguments resonate with people who aren’t really informed about the issues or have thought about the potential consequences of what they’re trying to do. On the other side of the coin, conservatives tend to use logical arguments, and those resonate more with people who know what they have to lose and are trying to protect that.
I watched the two sides talk past each other continuously. I think in all the time that I spent at the Capitol testifying, watching people testify, I can count the number of real inquiries from members of the committee on one hand. Because the thing is – the leadership on both sides – they generally have their mind made up. They know what they’re going to do. Feel free to speculate about why that is, and I might cover that topic a sudden another time. But right now, I’m just leaving that observation for what it is.
It’s interesting in kind of looking how each side operated. The left and the right operate very differently from each other.
The Progressive Approach
One thing that was particularly interesting to me was that every time the progressives got up, and particularly the groups that I saw again and again and again, they always used the same stats, the same arguments regardless of what bill they were talking about. There was a lot of times that I was listening, and I thought to myself, “This stat or what they’re talking about doesn’t apply to this bill. Why are they talking about that?”
The common thread that ran through almost all progressive testimony was fear – talking about the fear that people experienced and appealing to the emotions about how to deal with these fears. The progressives almost never talked about conservative issues. Again, I can count on one hand the number of times that progressive testimony in some way attempted to refute conservative testimony.
The Conservative Approach
On the other hand, conservatives generally came with specific stats targeted to whatever bill was being discussed. It was really fascinating listening to the two different sides sit there and quote different stats, and it was fascinating to me that the committees never really called it out. I’m sure a lot of the reps knew what was going on, but it’s really interesting that no one really bothered to say anything about it.
One of the other things that I did notice was that conservatives are focused very much on what they have to lose. In the process of trying to defend that, they didn’t acknowledge that people were feeling these fears – that the fears themselves were a real thing, regardless of whether or not the proposed solution was the right solution or even a feasible solution. No conservative have ever really acknowledged that the fear existed, and I have to admit that goes for me while I was testifying, too (hindsight is 2020). All the conservative arguments were focused really tightly on statistics and making logical cases for trying to solve the problem.
The leaders are leading
Throughout all of this, it was really clear that the political leadership (when I say political leadership, I mean both the people in the state government – the committee leaders, the senior committee people in both parties, and the big wheels for that were organizing testimony), all of them knew the game. All of them knew what they were doing. All of them knew what the other side was doing, and everyone just kind of accepted it.
Everyone knew that progressives were making emotional arguments. Everyone knew that conservatives were ignoring emotional facets of the issues. More than anything else, what came across to me is that the senior operatives were dedicated to their goal, and they didn’t really care about what anyone sitting in front of them were saying.
In fairness to a lot of the reps on the committees, I say that of the senior leadership. There were a lot of reps on both sides that I think genuinely care about their constituents.
Watching all of those hearings and that testimony and participating in that process is what really inspired me to make this post because I had to sit down and ask myself why was I seeing all this stuff play out the way that I was? The fear/safety, danger/security dichotomy and the dynamics at play between those things is what I landed on. I think that is what is at the heart of a lot of the hot button issues.
So what is the antidote to fear?
How do we find safety? If we are actually looking for real solutions, how do we deal with this?
Security is easy – actually implementing security. You look for tangible threats, and you do stuff to mitigate or prevent them. Pretty straightforward. True safety is probably impossible (with one exception). The reason is that safety is security combined with the banishment of fear. It is just not possible.
The reason it is not possible is that fear is an individual thing. We each have to wrestle with and overcome our own fears individually. No group, no government can do that for us. So, on our own, we will never be completely free from fear.
There is a way.
It is not a magical fix. It is going to take some work, but it will absolutely change your life.
The Warrior
Several thousand years ago in the Middle East, during the rise of the Assyrian Empire, and during the peak of the Phoenician Empire, there was a young warrior that gained notoriety on the battlefield. Because of this warrior’s feats, he was favored by the king.
The King
Now this warrior demonstrated time and time again an astounding loyalty to both the king and his nation. As the warrior’s renown grew and as his experience grew, he was promoted and became an acclaimed battlefield commander. But during the warrior’s rise, the king started to get jealous.
The Madness
He was worried about the warrior and started thinking that he might need to get rid of him. In one of the bizarre twists in the story, the king actually allowed the warrior to marry one of his daughters. That part of the king’s plan didn’t pan out, and he slipped further into jealousy and ultimately madness.
The Escape
It got to the point where the king directly ordered the warrior to be seized and executed. The king’s son loved the warrior like a brother, and between the king’s son and his daughter (the warrior’s wife), they warned the warrior that the king had ordered his execution.
The Danger
The warrior fled by himself to a neighboring kingdom. Remember, this warrior is exceptionally well known, and the kingdom that he fled to was not particularly friendly. The people in the kingdom thought they recognized him, which would have been a death sentence by itself.
The Answer
To cast doubt on that recognition and to protect himself, the warrior faked madness and wound up hiding in a cave – alone, cut off from everyone he’s ever known. He’s being hunted and he’s essentially in enemy territory. In the darkest of situations, when there seemed to be no hope, he prayed,
I sought the Lord and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.
Those are the words of the man that would eventually be King David.
True safety is found in Jesus and only in Jesus.
I asked you at the beginning
I want to ask you again, what rules your life?
Fear? Danger? Safety? Security?
Jesus rules mine. Because of Him, I have eternal safety. That’s the only way you can get it.
What I Learned
I’m still here on this earth, so it’s worth looking at what did I learn from that hike up Mount Cutler. The first and most important is that the woman I was dating was absolutely amazing, and I am so happy that she’s my wife, and we have two amazing kids together.
Aside from that, I still hike and backpack. I still love spending time in the outdoors. My awareness for overall preparedness was honed a little bit that night. I tend to carry a firearm with me more, for a bunch of reasons. I carry bear spray now too.
But the best prep of all – the best thing that you can do to be prepared for any situation that befalls you – is to see to your spiritual preparedness, your spiritual fitness and find Jesus Christ and ask Him into your life.
Closing Thoughts
I know this is a long post, but I think the topic is super, super important and we need to understand what’s driving discourse.
If you’re letting fear control your life, if fear has a hold of you, find a way to combat it, push it to the side, overcome it. Don’t let fear run your life. It’s ultimately a choice you make. You may have to get help. You may not be able to do it by yourself, but you can choose to seek help.
I’m going to say it again. Ultimately find the safety of Jesus.
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God bless.