If you really want or need security, you are not going to have it by depending on a police cruiser rolling by every hour of the day, nor with an alarm system
... nor assuming your "place" or your community is safe More important to you is knowledge - strengthening your own physical surroundings while increasing awareness of your own unique personality, and habits, and how you interact with, and within, your physical surroundings
- and such nuance is often more than the average person cares, or needs to know
... and in some cases is unfortunately more than a person wants to know, or heed.
As with all things, I recommend a healthy balance and not all of us need focus so heavily on physical security - although training never hurts anyone; the point being that one must be aware of threats to life and limb "to a necessary" degree
- unawareness being one unhealthy extreme, and paranoia another.
Like focusing too heavily on "thinking good thoughts" is an extreme
- maybe unhealthy when matters need tended to.
Matters like actively fighting racism, for instance
... even when racism is not "noticeable" - not obvious
"Fleeing to the suburbs" describes an American phenomenon in which mostly whites move to "relatively exclusive" communities away from what they perceive as dangerous, unsafe, even violent neighborhoods, and away from mostly minority neighbors.
Those who "flee" do so because they can afford to, even while many of their former neighbors cannot, so the move to the suburbs is an exercise of *privilege*
- not necessarily white privilege, but mostly.
I put "relatively exclusive" in quotes because there is NO "perfectly white" community, although such places are commonly perceived to exist.
Last year we were "reviewing" life details of those who were murdered at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-Hui, a man we will remember as also a human being - an extremely disturbed human being, yet a human being nonetheless.
Virginia Tech, as you know I am sure, represents just one in what is by now a long series of "school shooting incidents" and perhaps one of the most familiar names in that series is that of Columbine High School, which I will focus on for a reason that should be clear to you later.
As whites, mostly, "flee" to places like Littleton, Colorado - the home of Columbine High School - they do so with an idea to escape violence, or so they think, and the violence they want to escape is a perception ingrained in their minds by society itself - and not only in "white" minds is the perception embedded - of violence mentally associated with minority individuals.
Also I have said before that racism in our society is a sickness - a mental disease - which affects all of us, every one of us no matter who we are, and does so in ways of which we are usually unaware
- until we are aware, made aware.
African Americans have for decades consistently pointed out the "white propensity to violence" along with "white blindness" to their own, white, violence, and since the white population of this country is six times that of the Black population, violence on a per capita basis is a more serious problem among whites than within any minority group - the point being that any individual is capable of violence within, and due to, the same, or similar, circumstances.
Black "circumstances" are NOT "the same, or similar" but is actually a *separate reality* - and that element should also be more clear to you as you continue to read.
Sadly, the African American voice is not often heard among the white population - or better said, that voice is heard, but not much regarded, not taken seriously, no matter how much truth it speaks.
According to one member of a SWAT team waiting outside Columbine High School on the afternoon of April 20, 1999, those soldiers - and SWAT team members are soldiers - grew more frustrated as they continued hearing gunfire echoing through the school building - violence people of Littleton believed, in their false sense of security, they had left in some "bad neighborhood" - never suspecting "their own" to be capable of such violence.
Armed and ready to storm the building, to do the job they had been trained for, the SWAT team was told to stand down even as gunfire inside the building continued.
Confused, some of the team members wanted to know why they were being ordered to hold back, to wait while people inside the building were probably dying, and their radios soon delivered an answer from their commander, who told them, according to the team member recalling that afternoon ...
"these are white people, with money, and nice cars, and if we take this
building, and in the process kill anyone, these people will sue us blind"
So on the afternoon of April 20, 1999, the "privilege" - the class status - of whites in Littleton, Colorado, became a death warrant for their own white children.
Not because the people of Littleton were racist or guilty of overt racism, but because racism had infected their minds in ways unknown to them, had clouded their judgement, given them a sense of "safety" that did not exist in their *sureness* that "their own" were not capable of killing "their own" - even though similar incidents had already occurred in other "good towns" like Springfield, Oregon; Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; and Moses Lake, Washington.
In a society where white boys are raised to see white men portrayed as "being in control, in charge, stable, together," white boys eventually find themselves in situations they cannot "always win" and something has to give, and that pressure is often released violently, sometimes with guns, and in a "relatively exclusive" white community, that violence will be acted out against other whites, mostly
... and so there it is, as someone wiser said before me, "the pathology of privilege" - how "being the dominant group can set you up for a fall, can prevent you from building up the kinds of coping skills needed to deal with setback, because so often those skills are ones you just don't need."
Until you do need them ...
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Contributor's Note
Agree or disagree, I hope you will join our discussions.
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