Taking A Stand: Our town a safe place to call home
This is the second part of a three-part series on what the people of Warren County want. The first installment dealt with the need for good-paying jobs and business opportunities which will bring our county into the current century and give our children the option of settling in their hometown following college. This installment deals with the need for a safe place to live.
While it may stun some of you, Warren County is already one of the safest places you can live. Violent crime here is, on average, equal to most other small communities. Sure, there are occasional upsurges in violence but that’s going to happen anywhere you go. Aside from living as a recluse on top of a remote mountain in the middle of some sprawling Western state, you’re never going to get completely away from crime.
The present trend is to blame most of our crime on methamphetamine. Granted, meth is a real problem here. As a matter of fact, it’s probably our biggest problem. However, I think we’re too quick to blame all of our crime problems on meth.
Just think back to the years before meth. Wasn’t there crime here then? Back before meth, we blamed it on cocaine and before cocaine it was marijuana and before marijuana it was alcohol. We look to blame criminal behavior on substances, instead of laying the blame where it belongs – the people who commit crimes.
The basic problem is some people never learn how to become good citizens because their parents don’t care enough to bring them up right. They never instill a feeling of social responsibility and then seem surprised when their kids get in trouble and become nothing but a burden to society.
I firmly believe thieves would be thieves regardless of the existence of meth or cocaine. Wife beaters are going to beat their wives, sober or not, because they are violent people. This is because they’ve never learned respect for others. And whose fault is this? Well, it’s not the drugs, it’s not the schools, and it’s not the churches. It’s a parent’s responsibility to raise a child right. Putting the blame on others is simply the easy way out.
Do some kids of good families turn out bad? Sure they do. And, why is that? Because they hang with the wrong crowd. That’s why you have the same old folks taking up space at Security Circle all the time. They get out, swearing they’ll change, then they go back to the same old crowd. For the jail to be as bad as all these folks talk about, there sure is a big waiting line to get back in.
The bottom line is parents must take responsibility for their children and then the children, once they’re grown, must take responsibility for themselves instead of whining about how life has dealt them a bad hand.
Folks, we have a few bad apples here, just like anywhere. However, by the same token, I’m not afraid to walk the streets at night because, all in all, this is a pretty safe place to live when you compare it to other places. Sure, there’s the occasional nut job who will dash our sense of security with some heinous crime, but that can happen anywhere.
So, long as we’re vigilant as citizens, I believe we can keep our town a safe place to live. We can do this by reporting crime instead of not wanting to get involved. Security is everyone’s responsibility, not just that of law enforcement. Our merchants can also do us all a favor by taking ephedrine off their shelves since it’s a key element in meth. The small profit they make isn’t worth the risk of putting this key component in the hands of meth-makers. Make them go out of town to get their products and maybe they’ll stay gone.
(Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)