Okay, so maybe I’m not as liberal as I pretend to be…
After getting home last night I went through my usual routine of plopping the mail down on the kitchen table and getting started on cooking dinner. I didn’t think anything of it. There didn’t appear to be anything special about the pile, just the usual assortment of bills and fliers and junk mail but as I was settling down to my gourmet feast of beans and weenies one of them caught my eye.
It was a notification by the local authorities informing me that an individual who was a registered sex offender had moved in a few blocks from my humble home. His two crimes were both committed against minors. If you ask me, this was hitting too close to home.
I thought to myself that being a single parent of a thirteen year old girl was hard enough. These days, she’s sprouting more than her independence and trying to control her whereabouts and wanderings is getting tougher and tougher to manage.
Maybe I’m an idealist but I still believe in a world where you can trust your neighbors to look after you. If they go away on vacation, you watch over their home like you would your own. You pick up fliers or newspapers that have gathered at their doorstep while they were gone, you keep an eye open for any strange goings on on their property and you water their plants. If you’re headed out to the grocery store and you happen to see them outside, you ask if they need anything.
I dunno, I guess it’s just the way I was brought up.
So over the next few days I’m sure the phone lines of those of us who are parents in my neighborhood will be burning late into the night. There will be all sorts of ideas about block watches and making sure the kids who congregate in and around our homes do so in groups.
Fuck, I never had to worry about this as a kid. I don’t think my parents did either. If they did, they didn’t bother to tell me.
The notification also included the individuals name and his picture. Me and borgette went over the steps she was to follow if he ever approached her in any way shape or form. They included but were not limited to running, screaming, kicking, biting, scratching and gouging.
We didn’t need to go over mine….