Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 17, 1994 TAG: 9401220015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joe Kennedy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``GROWING UP SCARED,'' its cover shouted. ``How Our Kids Are Robbed of Their Childhood.''
A smaller headline at the top of the page blared, ``Guns for Toys: The New Anti-Crime Crusade.''
I get nervous when magazines start screaming like that. I get nervous when the mass media start bellowing about childhood. I get extremely nervous whenever big-city journalists grab me by the neck and insist that I pay attention to what they want to say.
The commotion made me so nervous I decided to go to the mall. I wanted to find people who didn't have magazines to sell or axes to grind. I wanted to ask them about crime.
The first person I spoke to was a guy about my age, sitting on a bench. His name was Clayton Horne. I asked if he felt threatened by crime.
``I probably feel safer now than I have in the past 10 or 15 years,'' he said. I was so shocked I contemplated calling Newsweek. Then he said he teaches high school for a living. I was even more shocked.
Horne explained that he teaches chemistry and biology at George Wythe High School in Wythe County. It's a small school of about 600 students, two-thirds of whom he knows by their first names. Most of the kids are good kids, he said. A few may drink, but drugs seem out of fashion. Pregnancies occur, but not in vast numbers.
What about guns? I asked.
``Guns are part of life up there,'' he said. ``Most every boy is a hunter.'' But he didn't know of any gun problems at the school.
Last summer, Horne attended an education seminar in Texas and met some teachers from the Bay Area of San Francisco. They told him their classes were large, with 36 to 49 students in each, and they said policemen were stationed on the halls. Horne couldn't believe it. I guess that's why he feels safe.
I strolled over to the video arcade. Teen-agers were crowding around Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II - games so gruesome, I had read, that the manufacturers have agreed to issue ratings.
On the screens, combatants were slashing each other with knives and swords. Blood was flying. A character lopped off an opponent's head. It sounds worse than it looked. It was like a cartoon.
A man and a boy came along to watch. The man was Steve Conner, a salesman from Moneta. His son was Ian, celebrating his 12th birthday. Ian was carrying a video game magazine.
I asked Conner if he thought the world was more violent than it used to be, and he said yes. But he was philosophical. ``You try to do the best you can and teach kids the way things should be,'' he said. It made sense to me.
I walked around the mall a bit and noticed a woman with a toddler and twin boys in a double-sized stroller. Her name was Margaret Loomer. I asked if she worried about crime and its effect on her children, and she said she did. At last, I thought. Someone as anxious as I was.
Then she said, ``We moved here from Long Island. We think it's safer here. ... It's a much safer place to raise children.''
Of course, she is still careful when she takes her children out in public. And she has already warned Sarah, who is 3, about the harm that can come from strangers. I told her the Polly Klaas thing in California, where a girl was kidnapped from a slumber party and murdered, really got to me. So had the abduction and murder of Phadra Carter, the girl from Rockbridge County.
She said she knew what I meant.
Back at the office, I made some calls and looked at some files and found that the crime rate in Roanoke city dropped in 1992 and isn't thought to have changed much last year; that, nationwide, violent crime went down 3 percent in 1993; that the murder rate in New York City had dropped for the second year in a row and that the national murder rate went down 3.8 percent.
I called Joel Best, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who wrote a book called, ``Threatened children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child Victims.'' Best told me certain crimes get so much media publicity they seem more prevalent than they are. Such cases are terrible, and we should try to prevent their ever happening. But we shouldn't be paralyzed by them. And we shouldn't let our fears paralyze our kids.
A few days later I called Douglas Loomer at his office. He's the husband of the woman I'd spoken to at the mall. He came here 10 months ago to work at Elizabeth Arden as an industrial engineer.
I asked him what life was like on Long Island. He said it seemed infinitely more dangerous than here.
``We only lived a few miles from that little girl who was put in the dungeon,'' he said, referring to Katie Beers, who had been imprisoned and abused by a family friend. When the story broke, Loomer tried to drive past the house where it happened. He wanted to get a look at John Esposito, the accused. But the area was blocked off.
I asked him what his friends said when he told them he was moving here.
```Lucky you,''' he said. They talked enviously not only about the lower crime rate, but also about the lower cost of living, the beauty of the mountains and the friendly people.
Loomer laughed and said he was glad I called. When his wife got home from the mall the other day, she worried that maybe I was a criminal, seeking information that would enable me to burglarize their house.
I said I could understand that.
He said he and his family love living here.
``If I ever had to leave this job, I would try to stay in this area. I can't think of a reason to return to New York.''
I said I could understand that, too. And I wished him the best at his job.
Naturally, all this talking and thinking made me feel a lot better. The whole business of crime and the worry it causes reminds me of one of my aunts, who died a long time ago. She and her family lived in a big shingle house surrounded by trees, and she was scared to her bones about lightning.
Every time a summer storm came up, she'd take a chair and put it in a closet off the dining room, and sit in there and wail until the siege had passed. I'll never forget her leaping up from the table and lugging her chair off, while my uncle and cousins hooted and cajoled in futile attempts to bring her back.
Not once was she, or her house, or anyone in her family struck by lightning. It could have happened, but it didn't. In the meantime, she missed some great meals.
by CNB