The real reason you haven't felt safe in 8 years

There is a lot of hubbub right now about President Trump's border security strategy. Whether it's the travel ban, the moratorium on accepting refugees or the proposed wall along our southern border, the controversial policy proposals are undeniably drastic.

But does drastic mean irrational?

Perhaps not.

Let's put things into perspective. I mean proper perspective, not partisan political perspective or sensationalist journalism perspective or rebel-without-a-cause protester perspective.

There is something very rational – very natural – about the need for security. It is innate to us as mammals. We start out in the fetal security of our mother's womb. We cling to loved ones from our first postpartum moments in this world. When our loved ones are out of reach, we cling to a favorite blanket or a familiar stuffed animal. From the time we're old enough to build walls around ourselves, we do so. It is why men love guns and why the elderly fall for those "I've fallen and I can't get up commercials." It is, simply put, the instinctive longing for that instantly recognizable sense of security.

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To me, security is different than safety. I've worked in the public safety business my entire adult life, so I understand the distinct contrast between the two.

Safety is a very real condition. It means you're free from any real threat to your personal well-being, that you are invulnerable. It doesn't mean that you necessarily feel safe. It means that you are safe.

Quite to the contrary, security doesn't mean that you are safe, it means that you feel safe.

Many Americans haven't felt safe at all for the last eight years. In my humble opinion, they haven't been very safe for the last eight years, either. That's a matter of national priorities.

For the Obama administration, national defense and border security were relatively low priorities. Social programs, particularly the overhaul of our health care system, were an all-consuming focus of the Obama White House. The president exhausted much of his political capital with Congress and a lot of his credibility with the American public advancing his eponymous health care program. And the ensuing battle to preserve his signature legislation pre-occupied him to such a great extent that nothing else seemed to matter much.

Concerns about our porous borders, the threat of terrorist attacks on our own soil, the geopolitical consequences of the Arab Spring, the growing influence of the Islamic State abroad, and the declining readiness of our military all contributed to the feeling of insecurity incubating in the American psyche. But those very legitimate concerns were dismissed out of hand, and we were constantly told by Obama and his sycophants in the media that our fears weren't reasonable – that they were some form of hysterical xenophobia.

It wasn't xenophobia – the irrational fear of foreigners. To coin a phrase, it was exophobia – the very rational fear of external threats from beyond your national borders.

For most people, though, threats from abroad seem like a very esoteric thing. The experience of seeing chaotic violence on your TV screen and seeing it through your living-room window are radically different.

That is where the Obama administration lost the hearts and minds of Middle America – and that is where Donald Trump found them.

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While foreign threats to our security inspire rather nebulous concerns in a country that is separated from most of the rest of the world by two very large oceans, domestic threats to our safety playing out in the streets of American cities create a very plausible feeling that danger is at our doorsteps.

President Obama lorded over a period of visibly declining safety in the United States. Violent crime spiraled out of control but, honestly, people can handle that. Crime is seen by law-abiding, middle-class Americans as cyclical, and, frankly, the 30 miles of interstate that separate the inner cities from the suburbs might as well be as wide as those oceans that insulate us from threats abroad. There is an undeniable disconnect between rampant crime in urban America and the unaffected cozy confines of exurbia.

That disconnect vanishes though when soccer moms and lacrosse dads witness isolated, random acts of violence turn into organized rioting, looting and arson, particularly when the president sides with the mobs and engages in unwarranted, unnerving criticism of law enforcement. People want to be snuggly surrounded by that thin blue line. It is reminiscent of the blanket they clung to as toddlers.

And, once the citizenry loses their confidence in their leader's ability to keep the homeland safe, the notion that foreign threats are a very real danger is all the more believable.

So this is where the exophobia comes from – the endophobia born of the very real experience of watching your own country burn at the hands of domestic terrorists while our president blamed the police who protect us.

You might think President Trump's border security policies are abhorrent. And to be honest, I think they go a bit too far. But until that cuddly feeling of security returns to the American people, anything goes because people want to feel safe.

My preference would be that President Trump concentrates his efforts on curbing crime and supporting the police, in other words increasing the actual safety of the American people. But, if you can't create the reality safety, people will gladly settle for the perception of security.

Either way, there's only one person to blame for the absence of safety and security in America. And it ain't this president.