Today's culture in America is increasingly afraid, and not without good reason. There are numerous polls out there talking about how a majority of citizens fear a mass shooting, and Time even published an article about how a third of Americans now consciously avoid places they think a mass shooting might occur. The thought of a person with a gun entering a mall, a movie theater, a church or a party has become so pervasive it infects everyone. Even our children, with active shooter drills now a part of school life.
Unfortunately, guns aren't the only thing that can incite fear. Anything can be used as a weapon, and in the wrong hands can be deadly. Even simple tools, like hammers and axes, can be converted into instruments of death. That fear is what leads to people being judged on appearances and based off of outdated and inappropriate stereotypes. As civilized human beings, we all know judging people based off appearances is wrong. Despite that, we still do. What makes it worse is that sometimes we discover we were right to do so.
I take my meal breaks away from the store I work in. I live close enough that I can drive home, comfortably eat a meal, and then return to work. On one auspicious day, I was leaving for my meal and I saw a curious sight. A man dressed in dirty, grubby clothes, dancing in the street and waving around what looked like a large piece of shiny metal. As I inched further along the road, I realized he was waving around a large machete and headed for the building I'd just left. As a conscientious employee, I pulled into a nearby gas station and called my workplace, warning them of what I'd seen, only to learn he'd already entered the store and was happily dancing around, waving his machete and terrifying customers and employees alike.
Normally, this is where the story ends with the cops being called and someone getting arrested, but there's a bit more to it than this. Not only did this man terrorize everyone, but he wandered over to where the store's collection of garden tools happened to be. He then took every single machete stocked on the shelf. Right in front of the district manager, who happened to be visiting the store at the time. Machete man then wandered out through an emergency exit and started passing his stolen machetes out to the various vagrants and homeless who happen to call the nearby empty lot home. Once he was down to his original weapon, he happily danced off, waving his machete and generally behaving like a fool. All of this happened in the span of about ten minutes, long before a police response could arrive and do anything to prevent it. No amount of financial compensation would have been enough for an employee to consider confronting him.
Nor should there be.
What we need to consider, though, is how a situation like that would have been handled a decade ago. A happy man dancing around and waving a machete would not have been met with an assumption of death. The fear would have still been there, but not to the extreme it now is. Now, strange or erratic behavior creates an instant note of terror in the minds of the witnesses. Instead of wondering what could possibly be wrong and how we can help, we instead wonder if this is the person who's going to gun us down in cold blood, just because we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn't safe. It isn't healthy. It certainly isn't sustainable.
We live in a state of hyper-vigilance. It's only a matter of time before things go wrong and we snap.