As children, we tend to develop aversions to certain foods — usually ones that are green and perfectly healthy. Maybe we tried once and decided we did not like the taste, but as likely, we received messages from our peers, whose own dabbling in culinary adventures was not exactly on the level of expertise. As likely, we have absorbed messages through our media.
Most of us, as adolescents or adults, finally get over ourselves and our prejudices that formed before daycare; at least we do when food is concerned. We can recognize how sad and silly those behaviors were toward spinach, but when we apply the same logic to other types of stereotypes, for some reason we are unable to tell stubborn adults to grow up and try new things.
A few individuals declined to attend the most recent Night Fall — not because they had other plans, were working, or just weren’t into the event (we don’t all have to like the same things) — because of the location. To be clear, the gripe about the venue was not how far it was from a bus line or that there were accessibility issues. It was that some did not believe they would be safe in a field around a few hundred families at an artistic event where there would surely be security and people generally looking out for each other. Ultimately that’s their loss, and maybe they regretted this decision when there were no reports of drive-by shootings occurring during what is essentially a giant puppet show.
But the sadness lingers, knowing that every day there are people in the area who deprive themselves and their families of free and low-cost entertainment and recreation because of fear.
Again, to be clear, there are risks. Always. Everywhere. When you drive to the mall to buy jeans you risk crashing, getting mugged, having your car stolen, and getting stuck in a pair of pants because you underestimated how much weight you gained.
On a few recent walks through various sections of Keney Park, there were some dangers: surfaces made slippery by a carpet of acorns, decades’ old rusty debris hidden by leaves in the woods, and those killer new speed bumps by the golf course.
Maybe this is the story we need to be telling again and again until our stories of routine normalcy trump those of violent anomalies.
Edw
Again I say thank you for a visual look at a community where no police or fire dept lights flash in the night. No tv announcer need speak to us to prompt a reaction.
I squirm at first looking at the milky water and red leaves of the brush of one picture. Then I see growing things struggling to find a place to capture light and live.