When Are You Really Safe?

I do not have any daughters.  We will start with that, because there is "sympathy" and "empathy" and other expressions of understanding of the pain of others, but I can't really personalize it as well as someone who can put a name to a situation.  What I feel for the family of people like Kate Steinle and others who have lost a daughter senselessly is a great sadness, but in a detached kind of way.

So it was with a bit of that detachment that I learned that the young college student from Iowa, Mollie Tibbetts, had been found murdered in a cornfield after jogging one day, but a real concern when it was announced shortly after, that the police had arrested, for her killing, an illegal alien who had been in the USA unlawfully for several years.

Many of us no doubt stared blankly when we heard of the disappearance of the young lady.  She was in a small farming town in Iowa, where one would have though that a 20-year-old woman could jog down the road in safety.  You and I might have not thought it a great idea for a young lady to be jogging alone in the evening in a lot of places, but Poweshiek County, Iowa, with houses around where she ran, would have been thought a place where it wouldn't have been frightening to do so.

Things have apparently changed.

There are places where you would not dream of walking down the street by yourself.  I lived in Chicago for a while, in 1968, on the South Side.  When I wanted to go walk to Comiskey Park one day to see a White Sox game, I was told to go with a group of exactly five.  To go with more was seen as threatening to the gangs that ran the place even then; to go with fewer was to wear a sign that said "target."  Five was code for "going in peace."  Young women did not jog alone there, to put it mildly.

Conversely, there are places where one would think it to be perfectly safe to walk or jog alone at most any time of day.  Poweshiek County, Iowa sure seemed like that -- midwestern, farm community, everyone knowing each other.  The community I live in has gated access, with more to fear, one assumes, from alligators than from bad people with evil intent.  Seems pretty safe.

But I fear that the case in Iowa has told us that, while we have come to regard different areas as completely safe, totally unsafe, or something in between on that spectrum, our perception of "completely safe" may no longer be valid.

And the element that may be causing that evolution in validity is, or includes, the issue of illegals in this country.  Surely we added a level of perceived fear after 9/11, and the actions of terrorists on our soil in recent years.  Knowing that there was a whole community built up in New Mexico to train terrorists is a real concern, especially given that the raid on the community seems to have eluded the mainstream media.

But it is a measurable concern when we realize that our southern border is a pathway for an uncomfortable number of people who simply do not respect the law, as blatantly evidenced by their refusal to apply for legal entry in the first place.  If that law is not to be regarded, then the same people can be assumed not to have regard for other laws -- including, apparently, murder.

I know that the left, which does not really want countries, let alone borders, will yell and scream that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than the population at large, which may or may not be true.  But it is not actually relevant, and certainly not technically accurate.  The crime rate among illegal immigrants is 100%, for obvious reasons.  They have made at least one decision to violate the law.

But it doesn't matter, really.  When you are already wanted for your first offense, you are willing to violate another law to protect yourself.  Paradoxically, with some, having already broken one law, and being wanted for that, it may seem like a "what the heck" to break another.  Can that be the motivation, or rationale, for the murder in Iowa?

We are talking about morality.  There is indeed a morality in this country; we were founded on it and the notion of right and wrong carries through to this day.  At least it did, until the left sought to implement a fuzzy morality, one that says that anything is right or wrong depending on your perspective -- and therefore nothing is actually "wrong."

It is actually fairly difficult to implement a sense of right and wrong across a population as we have done in the USA, and apparently pretty easy to plant the seeds of doubt as the left has.  By not stopping illegal immigration, we are allowing the entry of people with a morality that innately does not jibe with that of this country.

And at least one of those people has now taken the life of an innocent young woman in Iowa, a place where we would have regarded safety as the default.  Are we actually safe anywhere?

This is very uncomfortable.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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