Life full of `little' adjustments

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Let's see if I have this straight. This is how we must live our lives: We must never talk to strangers, must in fact, walk with our eyes down as if we are deep in thought, while we stride purposefully on our way. Purposefully is the key. We want our body to give out the message: don't mess with us. That's what the experts say.

We must walk on brightly lighted streets in groups, never alone in the dark. We must constantly be on guard. Is there someone behind us? Is that someone too close? Quick, cross the street and walk more purposefully. We must walk alone through parks or alleys or even sparse woods.

We must be vigilant in elevators. If we are alone and someone gets on, a someone who makes us feel uncomfortable, we must get off immediately and wait for another elevator. We should know what to do if someone corners us. We must shout as loud as we can. If we're wearing heels we should stomp on a potential attacker's foot, knee him in the groin and then run. We should carry mace. We should take self-defense classes.

We must drive with our windows up and our doors locked. We must keep our doors and windows locked at home, too, even when we're home, and especially at night. Terrible things happen at night.

When we travel we must not open our hotel door unless we are expecting someone. We must never carry a package on a plane for a stranger. If we leave a drink unattended, we should not finish that drink.

Someone could have put something in it.

We must not trust a person because of a uniform. We must demand identification and not open a door until we see it. We should get an alarm system or a dog, move out of bad neighborhoods, avoid subways and cities and other known danger zones. We must tell our children not to trust a person because he is a policeman or a priest or a grandpa or someone else's daddy. There are bad people everywhere who look just like the good people, we must continually say.

We must not let our children wear clothing or jewelry with their name on it. We must explain to our children early on that someone might try to steal them and hurt them. We must give them a code word that only we and they know. Don't ever go with anyone unless he knows the code word, we must say: Not even if someone says Mommy is dead; not even if he insists you must come.

We must work real hard and live in the right neighborhoods so that our children can go to the good schools where there are only a few knives and no guns, not yet anyway. But we must be ready to move again when the guns come. We must keep our cars serviced and never run out of gas and never get lost because you never know if a person who stops will try to help or harm you.

"All I do is adjust," a friend said earlier this week. "That's what we all do. Think about it. I drink bottled water, don't you? Doesn't everybody? You know why we drink bottled water? Because the water that comes out of our taps is full of God-knows-what. So we don't use it. We don't fix the water, of course. We don't make an attempt to clean it up. We just circumvent the problem. That's what we do with all our problems."

We don't eat fish because the ocean's polluted. We vacation in St. Thomas but not Haiti, in Cancun but not Nicaragua.

We are children making a mess and moving on. We don't take responsibility for what we do. And we don't demand responsibility from anyone else.

And so we have toxic landfills and polluted air and nuclear wastes seeping into groundwater and lakes where the fish are all dead and ponds where people can't swim and cities where people shouldn't live and food that is unsafe to eat and on and on it goes.

What's going to happen when there's nowhere left to run? When the cities are all war zones, when every school's a battlefield, when there are no more green fields or fresh fish or safe harbors.

For so many years we in this country lived in fear that the communists would destroy us. That they would secretly infiltrate our schools and our businesses or attack while we slept and take away our freedom.

"Freedom is our most precious gift," our teachers used to say and even in our youth we knew this. We were free to travel without fear, free to be whatever we wanted, free in a land of plenty, free to be free with one another.

Our freedoms have shriveled; our dreams now have bars. There are off-limits signs all over this country and we march blindly past.

Instead of caging the criminals, the criminals have caged us. And every day our cage gets a little smaller.