Dear Readers: Walk Not in Fear

By Jerry Berger
Berger's Beat
July 20, 2012

http://bergersbeat.com/

In California it was a McDonald’s. In Texas it was a Luby’s Cafeteria. In Arkansas it was a public school. And Columbine is seared into our collective memories. Now we have Aurora, Colorado, as the locale where a solitary madman spent his rage and took innocent lives. Such madness grips the sane majority with disbelief and can make us fearful one of another. But as Edward R. Murrow brilliantly declared while fighting another kind of senseless fear, McCarthyism, we are not descended from fearful men (or women, the colyumnist hastens to add). From all indications, the massacre at a Colorado movie multiplex was the work of a single disturbed individual. To be sure, there are troubled people everywhere. The sizzling summer heat cannot help. But the colyumnist takes comfort and finds courage in some facts that, while basic, are worth remembering on a day like this. First, for every troubled individual, there are many scores of brave law enforcement officers and individuals who unselfishly walk daily between us and danger. Second, in America, assembling in public places isn’t just a right, it’s part of our sturdy fabric and that cannot be torn apart by a kook who comes unhinged – we cannot allow it. And third, don’t blame the movies – any particular movie or any particular theater. At Wehrenberg Theaters in the St. Louis area, for example, security will be intensified this weekend, in an abundance of caution, and “The Dark Knight Rises” will be showing day and night – because, as reviewer Mark Reardon said on KMOX radio, it’s a great movie. And parents and kids will enjoy it, and they need the reassuring company of one another. So, despite the heat, the colyumnist will be going to the movies this weekend. You should too. Do not walk in fear. Settle back and escape from the day’s concerns and the heat. And pass the Milk Duds.