In Our Post-9/11 World

Protection and risk assessment become crucial

Safety and health experts worry about declining enrollment in university safety and health programs. One of 9/11's many lessons: Someone's got to take on the risks of the world — and the workplace.

Intuitively we seem to know this world can be a scary place. Maybe that’s why we have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. Then as we adjust to our surroundings early on, we see threats everywhere: monsters in the closet, in our dreams, under the bed.

As we grow older, though, we’re trained to forget these fears. Don’t be a baby, say parents, teachers, coaches and friends. Come on, you can do it, jump off that diving board. A mom tries to convince her frozen ten-year-old to roll down a five-foot-high “quarter-pipe” at a skate park. Look, Timmy’s doing it and he’s only seven. A frustrated dad pulls his boy aside after they drive home from a soccer game, pushes him in the chest a couple of times to “toughen him up”, and tells him he’s got to be more aggressive out there.

We get other messages, of course: Anything you can do I can do better. You got to take some risks to get ahead. We learn to compete and not to complain, not too much anyway. Suck it up. So we keep our fears to ourselves and build a network of defenses to keep the outside world at bay. We learn to rationalize. Make excuses. Look the other way. Nah, it can’t happen to me. Stuff like that only happens in movies.

Then one day real life becomes something out of a movie. Teens take over a school and shoot up students and teachers. Or jumbo jets plow into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. It’s shocking. Horrifying. Yet somehow not completely unexpected. Two years ago my kids didn’t want to go to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the millennium because it was reported to be a terrorist target. When police cleared us out of Union Station on New Year’s Eve for a private party, the kids at first swore a terrorist attack was underway. Told you so, dad.

Self-defense
We’ve got all sorts of coping mechanisms to contain our fears, from Paxil to the pub around the corner. Perhaps the most common and most powerful is pure denial. Denial is strong and enduring. For hundreds of years, for instance, we believed that two oceans protect us in this country from the rest of the world’s problems. Until September 11th.

Safety pros deal with the power of denial everyday. No one wants to think about getting hurt on the job, so basically they don’t. It gets back to our training, our defenses, and the fact that you’ve got to get out of bed in the morning and make a buck. So we go through our days denying and even risking the dangers that can happen. It struck me in the days after September 11th how fortunate we are to have those who deal with the darkness we’d rather deny. Everyone from the guy who plots the evacuation routes in your building to agents monitoring terrorist movements around the globe. It’s an impressive list: police, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, military personnel, and yes, workplace safety and health personnel. Most of us don’t have a clue how these people go about their work.

But I’m grateful they’re on the job. Too bad we don’t grasp how much we need these kinds of courageous souls until something goes wrong and our defenses are pierced. That’s denial for you. I wouldn’t be moved to acknowledge them now if not for September 11th. But after all we’ve seen since, how can we not?

A calling
A few summers ago I went to dinner one night in Michigan with a longtime safety pro, a down to earth man proud of his accomplishments. He had a large family, with a half-dozen or so children, and I asked why none of them had followed him into safety. He said they probably saw how his job was around-the-clock. Heard late night phone calls to families of victims, to a boss, a reporter, an inspector. “You’ve got to have a passion for this,” he told me. “It’s like a calling.”
We ran a news story several issues ago about how fewer students these days are hearing the call to pursue careers in occupational safety and health. Ah, it’s not sexy, some safety vets told us. You can make better money in tech fields, explained others.

After September 11th, I hope more grade schoolers to college students realize that it can be pretty “cool” to have a job protecting and helping others. You can’t deny it, we depend on them. Tremendously. Always have, always will.