There are many modern languages that give you control without giving you the grotesquely unsafe constructs that C gives you. You don't need to pervasively be able to access arrays out of bounds. You don't need to pervasively be able to do arbitrary pointer arithmetic. Even if you do need to fool with that stuff you can always do it in some unsafe block. We've built methods that give you the control you need without the control you don't need.

Alternatively, consider learning assembler. No joke. While theoretically all my complaints apply only moreso, assembler has the advantage that being "the language we speak to the CPU with" means that it will always still have some use until such time as we switch CPU architectures. At least in the assembler world you know you're juggling lit torches all the time.