As a college student, I had a part time job giving campus tours. It was a fun way to fill free time and make some extra going out cash. I enjoyed it enormously and found it easy to provide animated tours, as I’ve always been an extrovert; comfortable making new friends. One particular tour included a father and his daughter. Approximately half way through the tour the father asked me the following question
“How safe is this campus?”
An excellent question, for the record. I plan to ask that
very question when I take my kids on college tours in the distant future.
The daughter rolled her eyes dramatically. It was instantly
clear that he asked this question on every tour. Or, at the very least, she
found him to be overly safety cautious. Imagine that… a high school student
wanting their parent to back off. How abnormal.
I looked directly at dad and answered his question. I
answered him honestly.
I told him that it was an open campus, so there were no
guarantees on safety or keeping out the public. I informed him that our
security records did not indicate any problems or events whatsoever, but that I
didn’t believe that statistic. With the sheer number of people on campus, it
would be irrational to believe that absolutely nothing unsafe had occurred in
that school year. I believed that those events (while probably relatively few)
were most likely unreported.
Dad listened intently.
I then explained that I believed safety to be a result of
wise decision making. I told him that I
avoided walking long distances alone in the dark and that I tried to make safe
choices. And that I had never felt threatened. I felt safe.
He smiled and thanked me for my honesty. He then looked meaningfully
at his daughter. She rolled her eyes again.
Today, almost 20 years later, there was a shooting at our
local mall. It’s a mall I take my children to regularly and I can honestly say that
I have never felt threatened there. I don’t believe that my comfort was delusional.
The event took place while my kids were in dance class, miles from the mall. I
was sitting the lobby, chatting with the other parents when one of my fellow
waiting parents received a text from an out of town friend, wanting confirmation
that she was ok and hadn’t been at the mall. We all pulled out our phones,
checked online for details and starting discussing.
One of the parents, a dad, is a Baltimore city police
officer. We learned this when he stated (with authority) that it sounded like a
personal event instead of one of the more random gun events that have been
occurring recently.
But he wasn’t finished.
Despite having sincere sympathy for those impacted by today’s
events, he was more than mildly irritated by the media attention the event was
receiving. He spoke about how events like these occur frequently in Baltimore city
and those events never make the media. At least not the first page or top
priority. When it occurs in the suburbs, however, it is life changing.
Noteworthy. Newsworthy on a national level. I have sympathy for his perspective. I would resent it
enormously, the world seeing my safety as lower priority than my neighbors’.
That said, these types of events are rarer in the suburbs.
The suburbs are perceived to be safer and statistically it’s probably true. My
children are relatively isolated from true danger or true distress. They may
think they are “starving” when our schedule overtakes snack time, but they have
no concept of real hunger. They make think that their parents and other
caretakers are mean at times, but they have no real concept of what it means to
be mistreated or neglected. I don’t want them to understand but I do try to
educate them on the reality that their life is blessed. Safe. Fortunate. They
are now reaching the age where I can start to bring them to shelters to
volunteer, so that they can see what real hunger or poverty looks like. I won’t waste that opportunity.
And yet, I still struggle with how to educate them on
safety. I’d like to fill their heads with a reality that is consistent with my
college reality, that if you make safe choices you will be safe. But is that
true? The schools currently execute “intruder” drills, very much the way my
parents were exposed to air raid drills and hiding under their desks. Our
generation only had fire drills.
What will my kids’ perspective on safety be? Will they see
it the way I did or will they have to be educated on gun safety in a way I
never was?
I hope not.
