Bad things only happen in “bad” neighborhoods.  People who rob, kill and rape are only from poverty stricken areas.  Only inner city areas have brutal crimes.  If a child goes to a good school and participates in sports, they will never harm or be harmed.  The nice boy, girl or child next door could never harm anyone.  The time for delusional thoughts is over.  The war of all people, of all neighborhoods, of all schools has trespassed  into my back yard while I was dreaming of white picket fences.

Friday evening may find most of a community watching the high school football team as young athletes run down the field toward the goal posts and victory only to party hardy on Saturday night at the expense of a young girl who had been drugged, awakening the next morning with her brutal rape filling the airwaves of a social media.  Young lives, innocent and not innocent, will never be the same again.

A young boy enters a high school cafeteria donning a gun where students are resting from their morning studies and catching up with the usual high school social pleasantries.   Suddenly, a spray of bullets rip through the chatter; the distinctive sulfur smell filling the air as the students scurry for cover only to see their classmates fall to their death in front of their eyes.  Not one of those students will be the same again.

A young man engages in a relationship with a young woman.  The dating scene between the two of them starts off pleasant at first but eventually fizzles out.  The young woman begins to obsess about the young man; her mind perhaps changing slowly from affection to pure jealously ends up leaving him in a pool of his own blood.

Two pre-teen boys sneak up on a mother and her infant son demanding money while waving guns.  When the money was not forthcoming because the mother had none to give; the young boys threaten to kill the infant if no money is given over and they follow through on their threat, leaving a mother to mourn her dead child.

These stories are a few of the “news-worthy” items that sounded from my television just this morning.  None of these events occurred in “bad neighborhoods.”  None of these events occurred in poverty stricken neighborhoods.  None of these events happened in bad schools or inner city areas.  They all took place in your back yard.  They all took place by the child who lives next door.