All was resolved in a couple of minutes, but it struck me that my neighbor has an alarm, I have an alarm, and the apartment building on my block has one of those doors where you have to buzz somebody to be granted access.


When, exactly, did we become Fortress America?


I live downtown, in a good neighborhood. The biggest hazard on my block is the occasional inebriate making his or her noisy way down the street from the nearby watering hole, hopefully not on his or her way to a car. By suburban standards, this would be a crime wave, but such is the part of urban fabric, and I barely give it a second thought.


Yet when I moved into my house, my father insisted that I have a security system installed. I remember saying “I live in a good neighborhood” and he replied “You are getting a security system.” My parents have one, too, and they live in an even nicer part of town. And all of those people living in those developments where homes aspire to ape Versailles have them as well, even if an enterprising burglar would have to get a second wind just to make it up the lengthy driveway.


Our cars have alarms, our offices have magnetic pass cards and don’t even get me started on what it’s like to board a plane these days. It would be easy to chalk up all this paranoia to post-9/11 anxiety, but it’s been this way long before that fatal day.


I hear stories about the time when people went to bed with unlocked doors and open windows and my first thought isn’t “how nice” but “what were you thinking?”


Fear, of course, is nothing new — politicians have built entire careers on Making Us Afraid, going back to the shameful days of Joseph McCarthy and various like-minded predecessors. But that kind of fear was Out There, and even folks who built backyard bomb shelters in the Cold War 1950s pictured The Menace as coming from Somewhere Else, as in Communist Russia.


Now, we are trained to look out of our windows at the slightest noise, lest a crack dealer, a child molester or a serial killer show up on our doorsteps or, worse, in our living rooms. There are folks who keep guns by their beds and build “panic rooms” in their basements.


A big TV news story the other week was about a mass murder in an Arizona gated community. No doubt every viewer had the same reaction: How could Something Bad happen in a gated community?


The boogeyman isn’t just human; my house has multiple smoke detectors, a radon detector and a carbon monoxide detector.

All necessary, of course — who wouldn’t want that kind of reassurance? But with all of these backups do we feel safer, or do we just have more to worry about — Wait! Wait! What about the Giant Mutant Death Lizards coming through that little vent in the attic?


Of course it’s right to protect your hearth and home and family. And I’ll set my security alarm before going to bed, and try not to notice the irony of what word lights up when I push the buttons.


It isn’t “Safe,” but “Armed.”




Stephen Kopfinger is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact him at skopfinger@lnpnews.com. blog comments powered by Disqus