I suppose you can tell a lot about a culture by it’s mottos and slogans, Americans used to adorn their flags with sayings like “Don’t Tread On Me,” or “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death,” today it seems our national motto is “Abundance of Caution,” a dispiriting and uninspiring theme, at least for me.

I Googled “abundance of caution” this morning and found 1,460,000 entries, a staggering catalogue of closings, regulations, procedures and changes meant to make all of us safer. Do you feel safer?

In New York, the animal rights people say the carriage trade must be shut down in an “abundance of caution,” because one animal death in an accident is too many. I hardly have the heart to tell them that horses have accidents on rescue farms much more frequently than on Manhattan streets, mostly because they are not nearly as well supervised or regulated. It is possible that the people who speak for the rights of animals do not know that horses in the wild have more accidents than horses in stables in New York could possibly have?

A local rescue farm owner tells me her horses have accidents four or five times a year, falling on ice, into holes, slipping in mud, kicking one another, tripping on roots.

Is there any animal or human in the real world, I wonder, who lives in a world free of the possibility of accident or injury?

In New Jersey, a governor wished to force Nurse Kaci Hickox into quarantine even thought she was tested and found to be free of Ebola and had no symptoms of any kind.  Even though the government and medical community all said she was safe and free to go home. He eventually conceded she didn’t seem to be sick, but said he had to act out of an “abundance of caution.” The governor of Maine used the same term when he tried to force her back into quarantine there.

In my local health center, a young mother with a cold ended up in an isolation room with a mask because her husband was at an airport recently and he sat next to a health worker returning from West Africa. An “abundance of caution,” said the nurse. Government officials use the term all the time now, to restrict visas, close airports. Schools use the term to lock down or shut down in an “abundance of caution,” two schools in the midwest shut down because a nurse with Ebola flew a couple of hundred miles away to an airport.

Colleges across the country are disinviting speakers, asking researchers who have been to Africa to say home, telling health care workers who have been to West Africa to say away from campus, they have even coined a new term, “overabundance of caution.”

An “abundance of caution” seems to justify government doing whatever it feels like doing to avoid any possible risk to anyone, including  breaking the law and brushing aside rationality, science and medicine. Or tossing out the New York carriage horses while ignoring veterinarians, behaviorists, trainers and animal lovers who know that the horses are safe and well cared for.

In Minnesota, three playgrounds were shut down out of an “abundance of caution” to make sure the kids didn’t fall off the metal slide. The list is astonishing, it goes on and on, and reaches into almost every part of our lives.

There are many threats and dangers in the world, but the land of the free and brave seems to have a new slogan, the land of the anxious and the timid. Our media is not full of stories exploring the ways we can go to Africa and help end the epidemic there, is is full of stories exploring ways in which we can lock up the people who go there, make them feel like selfish criminals, and ban anyone who is there or wants to go there or come  here.

What value does caution have, even in abundance, if there is no reason, perspective, compassion, or freedom? It sometimes seems to me that the people protecting us (and our animals) are as or more dangerous than the things we are supposed to be protected from.

In New York City, the mayor and the animal rights groups insist out of an “abundance of caution” – the term has appeared in several speeches about the carriage trade – that the horses must be banished from the city so they can be saved and taken to places that are demonstrably more dangerous and less supervised.

I think I prefer the land of the free and the brave myself, I don’t care to live in an abundance of caution, I would prefer an abundance of compassion, creativity and calm.

There is no such thing as a “no-kill” life, no human or animal endeavor free of risk or danger or accident. A life filled with an overabundance of caution is, by definition, an isolated, fearful, phobic and angry life. Just look at cable news or the messages on Facebook and Twitter. That much safety is too much for me, the price is too high.