By Jeanette Cooperman
Special to the FOCUS Blog

A year and a half ago, I did something I never thought I’d do. I left the city. Moved with my husband to Waterloo, a small German town on the edge of Metro East. He’d gotten a job running a historic site in Ellis Grove, so the small town life I’d always resisted was suddenly the only way to keep the job I loved.

It took me a month to realize the peace I felt was more than just exhaustion from a hurried move. Finally, it dawned on me: no noise. No screaming tires (God love those Bosnian boys), no wailing sirens, no blaring horns from the intersection one of our visiting friends fondly referred to as Mutant Corner (that would be Hampton & Chippewa). A Waterloo cop waved at me one morning and I’d already started to pull over before I realized he was just saying hello.

After two months, I wasn’t hyper vigilant anymore. And the difference was my first clue that I’d been hyper vigilant for 15 years. Double and chain locks were automatic. When I went on late-night walks in Southampton, I pulled our teddy bear of a standard poodle close to my side and hissed "Heel," wrapping her lead to a tight six inches to make her look fierce.

Now our new neighbors were snickering at us because we locked our garage. Granted, there was a summertime crime spree so serious Waterloo brought in the highway patrol and the police force of the neighboring town--but it involved a teenage boy breaking in to unlocked cars to steal iPods. The emergency-email-blast crime of the winter—it made the local paper’s front page--was the theft of a lamb from the Sts. Peter & Paul nativity scene.

Not the Christ child, mind you.

A lamb.

Slowly I relaxed into this new reality. I stopped clutching my purse tightly enough to smash its contents. I started greeting strangers without fingering my key ring. When I did hear an ambulance, I hurried outside to see if we could help. And all the while it was dawning on me: I’d never even dared to expect this kind of safety in the city.

Why not?

I mean, yes, OK, it would be naive--just as it's naive for me to relax my guard in Waterloo. Crime’s everywhere. But the basic sense of calm and safety I have now should be the norm, not a surprise. And even though greater density makes it harder to achieve, it disconcerts me that I’d stopped thinking it possible.

Safety’s calming. It makes you friendlier and clearer headed. You sleep better. You notice the moon. When children, even more than adults, have to live with the constant thought of possible danger (and here I’m talking seriously messed up neighborhoods, not little SoHa), it addles the neural connections in their brains. We know that. We nod wearily when they start committing the same crimes themselves, swept up in the antisocial impulses that have surrounded them since birth.

They’ve never gone a day without hearing about somebody nearby getting ripped off or knifed or shot to death. And if I, in the relatively safe haven of South City, had given up thinking change was even possible--and stopped marking the effects of the status quo on my psyche--how much more inured, thick-skinned and pessimistic are they?

You just live it. You screen out the sirens, you chain-lock the door, you swallow the only-sensible fear and suspicion every day with your vitamins.

And you don’t even realize it’s eating you up inside.

Jeannette Cooperman is a staff writer for St. Louis Magazine.