By Joseph L. Bass

There is a long history of people having trouble dealing with reality. For example, in the days of the transatlantic ocean liners like the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, mirrors were tinted rose so seasick passengers wouldn’t see how pale they were.

Technology companies have discovered a market for virtual reality goggles to help people live in a mythological dream. But in terms of important social issues, many don’t need goggles to avoid the obvious. They have developed a psychological filter to screen out the real world.

One of the common dream worlds involves public and personal safety. Violent crime is a serious social issue. There are enough safety dream advocates (voters) that government enacts laws based on false feel-good myths.

The fundamental concepts involve beliefs that government’s laws, law enforcement and courts can protect citizens from being the victims of violent crime. But when criminal acts continue, people call for more laws, more police and longer sentences.

The filtered-out reality is that the highest rates of violent crime are found in cities with the most restrictive laws and large police forces. Chicago, with 762 homicides in 2016, is just one example. This pattern has continued for many years, and today we have a large percentage of citizens serving long prison sentences.

The dreamers also filter out viable options to their myths. There have been many well-thought-out options based on history and criminology research findings. Consider Jeffery Snyder’s essay titled “A Nation of Cowards” that was published in the fall 1993 issue of “The Public Interest,” a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc. His ideas have been made available in a book.

In his essay, Snyder includes these strong words, “Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back immediately, then and there, where it happens. The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers.”

It is Snyder’s position that many instances of violent crime result in death and/or crippling injuries, because Americans have become too cowardly and ill-equipped to stop crime when it occurs in our presence. Victims become victims, because they believe in the dreamers’ myths that laws will be honored by criminals and that government can stop an attack upon them.

Snyder puts forth the idea that many murders and crippling injuries can be prevented by the potential victims if they have the will, self-defense knowledge, and equipment needed to stop attacks.

Think about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, eight years after Snyder’s essay was published. A few men with nothing more than small box cutters intimidated hundreds of people on three airplanes. The passengers did not “fight back immediately,” allowing themselves to be murdered and the men to murder thousands of others in the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington.

Are we to be a nation of cowards or a home of the brave?

Joseph L. Bass is the executive director of ABetterSociety.Info Inc., a nonprofit organization in Hobson. Email him at ABetterSociety1@aol.com.