And yet as I was typing this story out, and my opinions that followed, I began to wonder if the topic that I was touching on was just too big for such a small space.
However, it is something that I want to address, even in a short amount of time. Something that I believe everybody should think about, if just for a moment. Because I believe this is something we are all guilty of, men and women alike.
Last Monday night my best friend returned home from her college out in Indiana, Pennsylvania. When I went to pick her up, I got a flat tire. I unfortunately realized this just as I was pulling away from her house and into traffic. I made the decision to pull into the nearest side street and park under a street lamp, even though it meant driving further on the flat.
The street was deserted and it was 8 PM in Drexel Hill. For those of you who know of the area, it's not an awful area. It's known to be rather nice, for the most part. A black man walked down the street and asked if we needed some help as we tried to figure out were to find my mother's tire in her mini van. My best friend was hesitant. She grew up in South Philly and her parents taught her that strangers = imminent death. While I was wary, I knew little of changing tires and realized that unless we wanted to wait here for one of our parents to come help out, this guy was our best bet.
He kept his distance, made sure to stay within the light of the street lamp at all times and then brought his daughter out as further insurance that he was indeed not as serial murderer. My friend's calmness was lost on him, however, when he invited two more men, this time white males, to help.
At this point, it was reasonable to think that in the worst case scenario, we were outnumbered. We had no weapons, our escape vehicle was on a jack and my friend had bad asthma.
But why were we thinking these things?
The men were entirely focused on the fact that the jack my mom's van came with was awful and telling us places to go and buy better materials. If they weren't talking about car parts, they were talking about the football game that was on at that moment or making fun of each other. If we look at this situation analytically, they were just being regular, average guys. Nothing scary about them.
Yet I saw the apprehension in my friend's body language until we drove off on our "donut".
"Jess!" She hissed at me. "You gave them all the weapons! Didn't you see me staring at you?"
The event had her so spooked that when we stopped at a Wawa on the way back to my house, she was nervous to go inside because there was homeless man sitting outside by the door.
All of these events together finally led me to question: are we, as a society, creating fear of each other?
Not a day goes by where you do not hear a story of a kidnapping or a murder (wayward or otherwise). As children, we're raised immediately in awareness of Stranger Danger. My father taught me at a young age to not trust anybody. My parents were scared if I did not phone to alert them of my presence if I left the house.
I feel it made me believe that the world was a scary place. A place full of unknown dangers and untrustable people. I coasted through the first chunk of my life looking over my shoulder while outside and questioning people who looked at me for too long. I made friends cautiously and played my games like I colored my pictures: inside the lines. This is not to say that I never did anything stupid in my life, because saying that would be supremely pretentious. All I mean to say in saying this is that I never found myself looking back on a situation and thinking, "Why would I ever put myself in that place? A place where there was no way out?"
And then I went to high school and I met my now best friend. I saw the way that she looks at the world. If I thought that my lens was closed off, hers still had the cap on it. She saw things the way her parents saw them, in a very finite view. At least when it came down to people's actions.
So that night, while I made light of the subject until we were home, I questioned a lot after she left. I wondered when I stopped looking at the world like it was my enemy and when I started looking at it like it held other living, breathing creatures. I wondered when I started questioning the ethics of how people treat each other. I wondered most of all why so many others do not.
I can't leave my job in Springfield after dark without getting a worried text from my boyfriend wondering if I was on my way home yet. He too is blinded by bias of how the world "works." Now I could say, "maybe if I worked in a different neighborhood I would understand," but that phrase bothers me. Because did we, as a society, set that stigma? That certain places, certain neighborhoods just are a certain way?
I guess what I want to know is if by saying that the world is dangerous and the only way to be safe is to take precaution, are we promoting a world of violence and fear? If we started viewing the world as positive instead of filled with negatives, would the shadows seem so dark and looming or would they seem like what they really are: the negatives in the presence of light.