Leonard Pitts, Jr.
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | It is that time of year when a little boy's thoughts turn to monsters. Also, aliens, ghosts and superheroes.
Halloween is less than two weeks away and a child naturally spends a lot of time contemplating how to dress for the annual ritual of begging candy from the neighbors.
Eric, who is 6, had pretty much settled on going out as Harry Potter this year. Now my grandson says he doesn't want to go trick-or-treating at all.
He's scared of being shot.
Sign of the times. We live in greater Washington, D.C., which has been terrorized the last two weeks by a random sniper.
At this writing, he has killed nine people and grievously wounded two more. I can only hope that, by the time you read this, authorities have captured the freak. In the meantime, people adjust to living under the gun.
Which means that walkers and joggers have all but disappeared from my neighborhood streets. The man gassing up his car positions himself so that he can't be seen from the nearby woods. And the cashier giving change says not, "Have a nice day," but, "Be safe."
Yet of all the adjustments and coping mechanisms I've seen, none stings me so much as Eric's. He used to run out every morning to get the newspapers. Now he pauses at the front door, peers in every direction, darts to the tree in the middle of the yard, looks carefully around its trunk, then makes a dash for the end of the driveway. He snatches up the papers and sprints like hell back to the house.
In normal times, Eric's world is SpongeBob SquarePants and Blue's Clues, Chicken McNuggets and a big yellow school bus. Suddenly, it is also the fear of a death he never saw coming.
He'll be all right, of course. I've already made him one of those crazy promises grown-ups sometimes make. I told him the sniper wouldn't get him, and he seemed to find that reassuring. As for emotional fallout from the fear he feels, well ... there are neighborhoods where children face threats like this - and worse - every day. Somehow, the majority reach adulthood emotionally intact. Children are the soul of resilience.
But even knowing that, it's difficult to watch a child's illusions taken and his innocence lost.
The author of Eric's fear is said to have left a calling card - more accurately, a Tarot card - at the scene of a shooting in Bowie, Md. On the card, he is reported to have written, "I am G-d."
That tracks nicely with the mental portrait I suspect many of us end up with when we try to imagine the person who would do such things: impotent misfit with delusions of grandeur.
To the degree one can infer a coherent motive from the actions of crazy people, his desire seems twofold: to demonstrate to us that he holds infinite power over who lives and who dies and to illustrate for us that life is random, a crapshoot immune to prediction.
The first is demonstrably false - the idiot's first shot in this crime spree missed - while the second is an existential Gordian knot with which everyone must grapple sooner or later. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to do so before your seventh birthday.
But this, as we know, is a far from perfect world.
Putting aside whatever this killer's purpose may or may not be, though, there is a third lesson to this rampage, and it's the same lesson children always learn, eventually. You wish they didn't have to, but you know it's important that they do.
That lesson seems appropriate to the time of year when children's thoughts turn to monsters. After all, they tend to conjure creatures seven feet tall with pallid skin and bolted necks, red eyes and cruel talons. But Eric, along with a thousand other children, now knows the truth:
Real monsters look just like women and men.
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