Somebody Else Isn’t Going To Help You.

My friend Kathy Jackson has a great post on how all of us tend to think that bad things will always happen to somebody else, when in reality, we are just somebody else’s “somebody else”.

I confess, I lived like that for a long, long time. I grew up in Canada, and despite having some sky-high murder rates, we never thought of violent crime as something that affected us. We lived in good neighbourhoods, we didn’t do stupid things with stupid people, and besides, there would ALWAYS be a Mountie nearby when we needed one, right?

Then one night, a group of friends and myself went camping, and late at night, after we’d all retired, a group of yokels made camp near us, lit up a huge bonfire and started shooting shotguns off into the air, and I realized that if they meant to do us harm, a cop would NOT be there to protect us and the only thing we had to defend ourselves was a hatchet.

Somebody else’s problem became MY problem, and quickly. That’s when I realized that believing bad things only happened to other people was not going to keep me safe, I was going to have to be my own first responder. 

What’s your story? When do you realize it self-defense wasn’t someone else’s problem?