When I was a kid in Upstate New York, I absorbed a simple rule from the adults around me:
America is safe.
Other places are not.
As I got older, left home on the cusp of my 20th birthday, and developed a curiosity about the world, I would mention places I'd like to someday see.
The response from Mom and Dad was always — why do you want to go there? I'll stay right here. Where it's safe!?
It's telling that they always left out Canada. We lived on the border and spent a fair bit of time across it. So — with that experience—Canada didn't seem foreign, scary, or unsafe. For as different as Canadians can be from Americans, the two countries look and feel pretty much the same.
What's even more telling is this: growing up, Canada was completely fine, but California was off limits. As a teenager, I remember saying I would only go to California if I had to — for work. To make it big in radio, my passion back then. As a few relatives liked to say, it was the land of fruits and nuts.
Same country. Same passport. Same language.
Still framed as unsafe.
The reality — when taking size and scale into account, California wasn't any more "unsafe" than the hollowed downtown of Niagara Falls, New York or the East Side of Buffalo.
None of these safe/unsafe classifications were logic-based. They all came down to experience (or lack thereof) and an unhealthy, unmoored fear of the other. It's a dynamic similar to the one that fueled white flight.
So when you start to see how this idea of safety actually works in America, you realize it's not based on data or lived risk. It's based on what amounts to nothing — familiarity and narrative. Places that look like home are safe. Places that feel different are dangerous. Even when the facts say otherwise.
I carried this with me for years without questioning it. Most Americans do. You don't interrogate the assumptions you grow up with, especially when they're framed as common sense. Even as my mind started to open after I moved away — to South Florida and eventually California — I held onto the sense that if it wasn't the U.S. I was already comfortable with or Canada, it must be a potentially dangerous place.
After all, why did we see (on television) men in military uniforms standing in Italian plazas with "machine guns" over their shoulders? Why did the nightly news always seem to be reporting some weird shit happening overseas?
We could handle reports of more inner-city violence or somebody shooting up 101 California because that felt normal, distant, or like a one-off — sometimes all at once. Of course, none of that is or, at least, should be true.
Murder is never normal — no matter who's committing it on whom. And 101 California ended up being anything but a one-off. It's one of the first-ever mass shootings in a nation where mass shootings have become a ho-hum part of the culture.
It wasn't until I started spending real time outside the United States — and eventually living abroad — that the story completely fell apart.
Not because Europe is some crime-free utopia. It isn't. But because the kind of danger Americans normalize every day is something else entirely.
In the U.S., safety is treated as an individual responsibility. Stay alert. Stay in your car. Lock your doors — we did this every single time we drove through areas you'd normally avoid. Don't look vulnerable. Don't get caught daydreaming.
That isn't safety. That's permanent vigilance. It's exactly part of what we wanted to leave behind when my wife and I moved to Spain more than a year ago.
The data reflects the reality.
For example, the World Bank reports intentional homicides per 100,000 people at roughly:
You can argue around the edges of any dataset — reporting standards, definitions, lag — but that is not a statistical problem. That's a completely different reality.
It's not that Europe is safer in some abstract way. It's the odds of getting killed by another person are dramatically higher in the U.S.
And some Americans still talk about Europe like it's a risky place, lagging the rest of the world, particularly the United States.
The other epidemic Americans normalize: cars. A different kind of violence.
The thing Americans treat like a birthright: driving.
Spain's traffic fatality rate has improved a lot over time, and recent official summaries put Spain at about 37 road deaths per million inhabitants in 2024 (or 1,785 people), which is lower than the EU average.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., traffic deaths are persistently massive year after year — tens of thousands of people annually. For the record, in 2023, there were about 129 deaths per million inhabitants in the United States. So the population size argument doesn't hold.
This matters because Americans don't just accept driving — they accept the death that comes with it. They accept it so thoroughly that the entire country is built around the assumption that you will drive for everything, forever, and that if you get hurt doing it, that's just… life.
Societies that prioritize safety, public health, and quality of life realize that sacrificing their citizens in the name of "freedom" is optional and unconscionable.
Here's one positive part.
When you leave the U.S., you don't instantly become some blissed-out European flâneur. You bring your American wiring with you. Because it's tough to shed.
You keep scanning. You keep bracing. You keep calculating the speed of a car at a crosswalk or the distance you are from the person behind you.
But then you notice you're doing it in a place where other people aren't. And that's when it hits: you weren't "being smart." You were carrying stress that had been packaged as normal adulthood.
In Spain, I'm not walking around thinking nothing could ever happen.
I'm walking around realizing how much of my mental bandwidth used to go to:
- threat assessment
- traffic avoidance
- social aggression and hostility management
- the constant low-grade expectation that something could pop off for no reason because it often did.
(Some) Americans love to talk about how tough they are.
A lot of that "toughness" is just untreated, normalized vigilance. It's a psychological disorder rather than a cultural trait to be proud of.
But here's another positive part of the story.
More Americans are starting to see it.
You can feel it in the anger. In the exhaustion. In the way people talk about schools, public spaces, driving, policing, guns, healthcare, and basic trust. The frustration is more than political — it's visceral. People are tired of living on edge and being told that edge is normal, necessary, even virtuous.
When you experience daily life in a place where safety is designed into the environment — into streets, transit, public space, and the social fabric — you realize how much of American "toughness" is just coping.
You don't feel euphoric. You feel lighter.
Once you feel that, you can't unknow it. And you definitely can't go back.