Watch out for guns

 

 "Watch out for guns," I tell my daughter as we sign off from Facebook chat. We talk a couple times a week. It is the same thing I would say if she were leaving me to drive home and I would say, "Drive carefully."

I'm currently in Southern France. She is in her office in Boston. She lives in a suburb.

Growing up in Boston there were always precautions. She was not to use the Fenway as a shortcut. Because our housemate worked at Simmons College, we were away that students would be raped each year if they wandered alone, especially at night.

As women we were always aware of having an escape route whenever we were on the street. We walked in the middle of the sidewalk. Our purses were worn across our bodies not just from our shoulders. We would wear shoes that we could run in if necessary.

Despite this we had been robbed in the 1980s.

Still we loved the city.

However, now there is a new danger, one far more frightening than the single robber or rapist.

A white supremacist group https://www.democracynow.org/2022/7/6/neo_nazi_nsc_131_patriot_front marched through our beloved city. They went by the Boston Public Library, a place we spent hours and hours. They attacked a black artist who is claiming the police were near by, but they did nothing.

Democracynow's story included reporting by investigative journalist Philip Martin who talks about the growing Neo-Nazi movement in Massachusetts.

Overall, I have always thought of Massachusetts as one of the saner states. 

I don't deny that there is racism. One just has to look up Louise Day Hicks and her fight against desegregation and the difference in quality between black district and white district schools or the hysteria when a white woman was allegedly murdered by a black man. It turned out it was the white husband. At the time I lived in the neighborhood where the murder took place and the tension was incredible. If I remember the white woman's family ended up creating black scholarships so her daughter's death would not be a cause for more hatred.

Today the world is different. As I write this there have been 315+ mass shootings. People heist AR-15s. Turning on the morning news, one wonders if there will be another. Most of them make the international news as well as the state-side channels we get.

I'm so grateful I no longer have to live in a place where to be armed is considered normal. I cry that my daughter is still there where merely shopping could be the cause of her death by gunfire.

The Supreme Court's ruling allowing open carry, is frightening. The idea that she needs to check who is toting a gun when she's buying cat food, veggies and meat is not the way anyone should live.