Turning Blind Eye to the Bad Guys Lends Little Insight

The guy’s picture was on the front page of the newspaper. He was smiling in this picture, with a sort of friendly, surprised look to his face.

If you didn’t know about this guy, you would place him in that crowd of innocuous strangers that shadows you everywhere, on the freeway, in the grocery store, standing in line for the movies, at the post office.

The Dana Point post office happened to be where this guy worked, before he was “let go.”

The newspaper called this guy a suspect and, of course, the story was hedged with many uses of the word alleged.

This guy allegedly murdered his mother and her dog. He allegedly shot his best friend between the eyes. He allegedly wounded and robbed others. He allegedly was in love with a former co-worker, and he wanted to kill her. To prove it somehow.

This guy hadn’t yet been caught.

This was, as we say in this business, news that you could use. We write it one way, but it always translates viscerally to something else. “Madman on the Loose” was how it telegraphed to my brain.

In a show of caution riddled with paranoia, I kept my children home from the park. The 6-year-old always needs a reason. “There’s a bad guy out there,” is how it boiled down.

The 2-year-old pointed to the picture of the guy in the newspaper. “ Loco ,” she said.

When my sister and I were growing up, my mother had a name for this guy, even though back then, he was just pretend.

She called him Mike Wick and to this day, I can’t think of him without forming the same mental picture that used to scare me late into the night. When we reached the age of reason, my sister and I told our mother that we were shocked she would resort to such fear-mongering to keep us in line.

(For the record, my mother alleges that the name Mike Wick simply popped into her head when my sister and I were pestering her while she was on the phone. To our pleas of “Who is it? Who is it?” my mother recalls herself answering, “Oh, Mike Wick!” Which instantly quieted us down.)

In any case, I vowed that, as a mother, I would never introduce Mike or any of his evil soul mates to my kids.

Of course, I was thinking of the bogyman as fantasy disciplinarian. I didn’t know that there was a chance he might actually stalk the streets where we live.

So in a split second, without so much as a thought to Mike or his friends, I decided to tell my daughters about the guy in the newspaper. I really didn’t want them running into him in the park. And we live in a “safe” neighborhood, as people like to say.

Yet I sacrificed a chunk of my children’s innocence, again.

Then the guy in the newspaper was caught. The 6-year-old relayed the news to her baby sitter, and they were set free.

Now if a bad guy shows up in the park, my daughters won’t recognize his face.

I went to the gym after that, a sweat-soaked indulgence, my so-called quiet time. The woman next to me on the Stairmaster, the machine that protects us from running and climbing in the wild out-of-doors, announced to a friend that she had heard the guy in the newspaper was in jail.

Only she didn’t really mention the newspaper straight out. She wondered out loud how he had come to be found and, not being able to stand it, I told her and her friend.

(He was drinking at a sports bar, having returned after allegedly robbing a couple at an ATM. He was recognized and police were called.)

The woman offered that she never reads newspapers herself. “Too much bad news!” she said. And she’s busy with her children, and her job. Only she will skim the ads.

If there is something of note in the larger world, she said her husband usually fills her in. She likes it this way, cushioned from such bad news that would keep my kids home from the park.

I wondered if the bogyman ever invades her children’s dreams.

I don’t know about the psychological aspects of all this, although I can guess, which is what parents do all the time. I’m guessing that my kids can handle the guy in the newspaper, their fantasy bogyman, because they have no other choice. Bad guys will doubtlessly disrupt their lives again. I want them to know about them, and to be prepared.

But what should they know and when? The younger our children are, the more we can filter their news. That is, if we live in a “safe” neighborhood. Unchecked fear routinely stalks children in neighborhoods that are not.

Still, the woman on the Stairmaster is by no means alone. Newspapers are worried about people like her. They’ve stopped reading, or even viewing, the news so as not to get themselves down. They say life is too short. They say let somebody else worry about all the gloom.

And that is a very dangerous sign. The Mike Wicks of the world love to take advantage of that.