While discussing a (soon-to-be-revealed!) project with a friend, I suggested that she go explore the south side of Chicago by herself for a day. She demurred on grounds of safety, which is entirely reasonable, now that I think about it. It also made me wonder if my perception of danger has recalibrated itself in Baltimore.

Now, because I loved The Wire, I watched Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on the book of the same name and produced by Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns (synopsis: a Rolling Stone reporter embeds with a Marine unit during the Iraq War’s early stages. The original RS articles start here, and are worth a look). In one particular scene, the unit comes under fire. While the reporter huddles next to the side of a Humvee, one of the soldiers next to him says something along the lines of “Most people think Iraq is dangerous, but safety is all about context. If we were to stand up, we might be killed. But to us, behind this Humvee, Iraq is a safe place.”

About a month after we moved to our current house in east Baltimore, my girlfriend read the then-year-old story of Zach Sowers, a young, freshly-married Johns Hopkins financial analyst who lived a few blocks away. He was jumped by a group of teenagers who beat him into a coma, and he eventually died from his injuries. And during the last two weeks of December 2009, there were six seven robberies, eight aggravated assaults, and two stolen vehicles within a half-mile radius of my house.

But to us, on our block, Baltimore is a safe place.

More potentially-related posts:

1. No, the key was not in the safe at the time.
2. Shrooms at Johns Hopkins.
3. “The Army pounds it into your head… Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do.”