Of living in NZ, but do tourists?
And if you were starting today you would probably say: it’s not safe to take people onto that volcanic crater given that a boiling deadly explosion can happen without even a moment’s warning.
There’s no point pretending we’re not living every moment here in a calculated risk that you might just as honestly call a game of Russian roulette.
It is the expression on the largest scale of the five-second rule where you drop something and it’s too inconvenient to toss it out, so you say it wasn’t on the ground long enough to catch anything, and cross fingers you’re OK.
Then, when things go wrong, we lurch to safety and caution and possibly recrimination and blame and arguably over-correction.
Often, blame will be warranted. But we are, to say the least, uneven and inconsistent about it.
Maybe we need to recognise that being too complacent in the face of what’s financially convenient is a habit we can’t quit.
A friend who loves climbing and the mountains says she expects she’ll probably die out there.
That’s not to say she wants to, not at all. But she recognises the risk she runs and the degree of danger. She sees it and accepts it.
Perhaps we need to be a bit more clear-eyed in that way, and not fool ourselves about the risks we’ve taken on and the dangers that cannot be outrun and cannot be mitigated with hard hats and safety instructions.
But what about visitors to this country? They surely deserve the right to make an informed choice.
Do they understand, or have they come here unaware that although we appear to have dressed our danger up as fun, the risk can be real and substantial? We surely owe it to visitors to alert them to our comfortable co-existence with sudden death.
The New York Times headline read: Why Were Tourists Allowed to Visit an Active New Zealand Volcano? We should not be surprised to see some recrimination.
To be fair, all life is a calculated risk. No matter how hard we try, no-one gets out alive. You can only mitigate so far.
Thirteen people died in cars last weekend, and their families will be going through just as much grief and anguish as the families whose loved ones died on the crater.
Maybe we have chosen to live with more risk than is good for us. If we’re prepared to wear it when things go wrong, that’s our right.
But we can’t have it both ways, and wishing the horror away won’t work.
There’s no point pretending we’re not living every moment here in a calculated risk.