Finding a safe place

The newspapers this morning headlined horrific news: 21 people shot dead on a college campus in the United States. By the afternoon, that figure had climbed steeply to 33 and who knows how high it will go before the story is deemed a final report before the investigation starts. This kind of nightmare has been recurring over the past few years, getting to the frightening darkness it now has in huge leaps. Maybe death always did lurk on university grounds and in school cafeterias, who knows; now, it is a fact of life that needs to be dealt with, not just by the law enforcement authorities, but also by behavioural psychologists. And not just in the United States, but all over the world.

This sort of arbitrary killing is not unknown anywhere in the world. There is very little that pushes a human being past a critical point, when they start acting irrationally and dangerously. The frightening part of the story comes with time and thought – India has been absorbing so much from the West, particularly from that El Dorado known as ‘the States’; is this penchant for slaughter going to be the next cue? Think about it.

I was once a student in the US, with little care for my own safety. I never knew what it was to feel threatened or scared. None of my friends or acquaintances was unstable or irrational in any discernible way and all of them had a thick vein of sturdy common sense and practical reality running through them. In fact, as a protected, sheltered, fairly innocent baby of the pack, spoiled by circumstance and all those who knew me and kept pristine by my own unsuspecting, accepting personality, I never even dreamed that anything could happen to me, or even that anyone I knew could be in any way ‘bad’ or ‘misbehaved’, leave alone ‘evil’. That in itself kept me safer than I could imagine.

As a result I took risks that I never realised were risks. I would walk home from the lab at 2 am, uncaring that I had to go through a deserted car park and cross a road that was a direct feeder between a mall, known for its rather insalubrious bar scene, and an expressway ramp. I would drive back across the county to my apartment complex long after the traffic had eased into somnolence, not worried about headlights following me too closely or the car in front slowing down too much, too suddenly. And I would find absolutely nothing wrong in talking to a fellow student who was young and male and known to be a rover, long into the night in an otherwise deserted college building. It was not that I did not know the dangers of it all, or the stupidity of my own behaviour, but just the surety that nothing could possibly happen to me.

In that, it never did. Someone was watching over me, I knew, so I could be sure that I was safe, no matter the provocation I presented. But I never thought of this kind of horror, where someone could walk into a classroom and shoot for fun, out of rage, from an inner pain that broke through its walls without warning. Who knows why these people killed. That they did is an evil that first their families, then the nation, then the world will have to live with.