barking a few streets over. It’s cold. It’s always cold in Keene at night. A silver blur zips by, followed by two more. A hundred feet past you, their lights flick on, bathing the street in flashing blue.
The wind blows, invisible fingers pulling at your jacket, seeking out inconsistencies in your woolen armor. You pull your coat tighter. God it’s cold. You’ve made this walk a thousand times before, in between your friend’s house and your’s, and normally it’s fine.
But tonight, you just don’t want to do it. You just wish you could blink and be home. But you can’t, so you put on your headphones, put your head down and keep walking. You whistle as you walk, and start thinking. Left at the stop sign, keep going straight till I take right onto… and it happens.
The unexpected blow to the side of the head knocks you to ground, and leaves you staring at the feet of the unseen assailant. Your head instantly starts searing white hot where he hit you, and your vision blurs as you look up and see a dark figure standing over you shouting something.
I can’t count the times I’ve walked home at night alone, at three in the morning. I don’t check my corners, I don’t carry a weapon. I just put my headphones on and set my legs on auto pilot. Perfectly safe, in my bubble of music that blends seconds to minutes as I walk home.
But we’re not totally safe. There was a mugging of four students last weekend, Campus Convenience was robbed at gunpoint early January and a gunman on campus before break. Though we may shrug these instances off as isolated examples, this is an increase. And it really does bring up the question of whether or not we’re safe. What is safe?
Is safety having a police officer on every corner, an armored car to deal with hostile situations, a pistol in a shoulder holster? Or is safety a system where we can all leave our doors unlocked and walk down streets at two in the morning?
How many people would enjoy having three police officers to every citizen? That would be much safer. But we’d be watched constantly. This is the conflict that Thomas Hobbes spoke of, the conflict of security vs. liberty.
In our society we’re trying to strike a balance between the two of them, but while it may have worked when our parents were children, it’s a different time. Drones are killing thousands of people. There are riots across the world. The eurozone is breaking down. There have been so many recent shootings that I’ve lost count.
My roommate Derek and I talk on this subject often, and he put it very well. He said, “We won’t see violence, we won’t see protests or revolutions, until people start going hungry.”
I know so many people who don’t or can’t rely on their parents to make ends meet. And they’re really struggling to do so. If this becomes more prevalent, we may see more of these simple crimes, and we may see them escalate. We already have protests in Central Square.
As the world is becoming more chaotic, as things get worse, we’re going to have to come to terms that we’re not just a sleepy little town. There are dangerous people everywhere; we’re going to have to talk about this.
The best advice I’ve gotten about this came from a press conference held in one of my journalism courses last semester. Katie Corbett, the Campus Safety/KPD liaison officer to Keene State College, fielded questions from some 20 journalism students.
In a question regarding safety, Corbett said the main thing is to be smart. Don’t walk alone at three in the morning. Listen and walk with friends. The world isn’t too bad yet, we’re not in a complete police state and there aren’t roving packs of gunmen traveling in pickup trucks.
But we’re not totally safe. Too many times have I heard that a friend of mine stumbled home at two in the morning alone. And there are people who are willing to steal, threaten, hurt others. Just be smart. Please. Be safe.
Augustus Stahl can be contacted at
astahl@keene-equinox.com