“Crime Is Down” – Or Have We Just Closed our Beaches?

As a writer of Science Fiction, I share the blame with my fellow writers for stories written about a dystopian future, but the idea of writing science fiction is fueled by what we feel the future holds.

We keep hearing that crime statistics are down–much better than they were in the 1950s, that kids are “statistically safer” than ever. But let’s put this into perspective:

In the 1950s, kids walked to school alone. Rode bikes across town on busy streets. Played in parks until dark. Went trick-or-treating for hours unsupervised. They left the house at 7:00 AM, in the summer, and their only obligation was to be back by dinner. There were no cell phones to get in touch with them and no game plan as to what they were doing or where they were going.

Today they are chauffeured everywhere, tracked by phone and never out of range from adult helicoptering. So when someone says “child abductions are down,” I think: Of course they are—we’ve essentially put kids under house arrest.

That’s like closing all the beaches and announcing “Shark attacks are at historic lows!” Well, yeah. There’s no opportunity for attack when nobody’s in the water.

The same logic applies across the board:

  • Burglaries down? We have Ring cameras, alarm systems, and never leave our doors unlocked.
  • Street crime down? People don’t walk places anymore—they drive everywhere.
  • Assault down? We avoid whole neighborhoods and stay inside after dark.
  • Car jacking is down: Cars have 360 degree cameras with recorded footage, alarms and can be shut off remotely. No one leaves their keys in the cars with the windows opened like they did in the 1950’s. Heck, keys were an “option” to starting the engine.

We haven’t made society safer. We’ve made ourselves smaller. We’ve adapted to danger by surrendering freedom—building higher fences, installing more cameras, restricting our movements, and never letting our kids experience the independence we once had.

The statistics don’t show we’ve solved the problem. They show we’ve accepted defeat and learned to live in a cage we pretend is normal.

When you have to fundamentally change your behavior to avoid becoming a statistic, the danger didn’t decrease—you just stopped showing up in the data.

This makes for great Sci-Fi writing… so thank you all.

3 Ships built per day, 1000 per year

When President John F. Kennedy stood before the nation in 1962 and declared that we would go to the Moon—not because it was easy, but because it was hard—he lit a fire that carried a generation into the stars. It was bold. Audacious. A promise that seemed impossible… until it wasn’t. Today, that spirit is alive again—but this time, it’s not coming from the Oval Office. It’s rising from the dust at Starbase Texas with Elon Musk.

As a kid, I’d lie in bed with a flashlight tucked under the covers, devouring Sci-Fi Pulp Fiction novellas long past bedtime. Back then, those glowing pages were portals—each word a beam of light teleporting visions straight into my mind. I saw moon bases, rocket ports, and human settlements scattered across the solar system. Those futures felt far-off but inevitable—like watching the first glint of dawn and knowing full daylight would follow. Not knowing then, I realized later that science Fiction is fact waiting to happen.

Now, that imagined future is solidifying into steel and launch pads on the Gulf Coast. Starbase, Texas—once a stretch of quiet shoreline—is transforming into the first entirely new city in decades, and more than that, it’s becoming the cradle of space colonization. Not just another launch site, but a functional city with its eyes pointed skyward. What once was fiction whispered to a child by flashlight is now a blueprint being built in daylight.

Most Americans haven’t quite absorbed this shift yet. The scale of it—what it means to have regular rockets, self-landing boosters, orbital refueling, and crews preparing to build on other worlds—still hovers just outside the public consciousness. But make no mistake: history will point to this moment and say, this is when it began. Not with flags planted in dust, but with concrete poured Texas and Florida, with dreams launched on reusable wings.

And Elon has managed to develop what feels like alien technology—without raiding the vaults of Area 51 or unsealing some forgotten Pentagon file. No secret spacecraft reverse-engineered from crash sites. No whispered hand-me-downs from shadowy defense contractors. Just the sheer force of vision, engineering, and iteration. It’s almost more unbelievable that way.

What we’re witnessing isn’t the result of hidden knowledge—it’s the result of someone who seems to think like an alien. A mind unbound by convention. While the aerospace establishment took baby steps, Elon sprinted past them, leapfrogging entire generations of tech. He didn’t wait for permission. He didn’t wait for NASA to go first. He moved fast, broke what needed breaking, and built a new space industry from the molten core of ambition.

In a way, Elon is our own alien developer—not from another planet, but from another mindset. He didn’t arrive in a saucer; he arrived with software updates and stainless steel prototypes. He doesn’t hide behind secrecy—he invites the world to watch. He tweets engineering problems. He launches Starships like we used to launch dreams.

The spacecraft we imagined hidden away in desert bunkers? He’s landing them upright on drone ships, catching them with chopsticks, naming them after science fiction AIs, and prepping them for Mars. And doing it all in plain sight.

Starbase, Texas, is not the endgame—it’s the launchpad for a civilization becoming interplanetary. A century from now, schoolchildren might look back and say: It didn’t come from aliens. It came from us. From a man who thought like no one else, and dared to build the future while the rest of the world waited for it to arrive.

This should be the most important 40 minutes shown in every classroom—a powerful antidote to the scrolling addiction that’s hijacking a generation’s focus, purpose, and potential.