No safe place
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL HIHPS Abigail McCarthy HO SAFE PLACE THE DRUG WAR COMES HOME To me there has always been something solid and comforting about the names of country places. For the most part, our...
...From east to west, for example, they named streets for what they were- Main Street, School Street, Church Street, River Street...
...It is not just the volume of the murders but their viciousness that appalls him...
...And with crack comes violence...
...We are all in this together...
...And a plain view over the rolling countryside...
...This has got to stop" (Washington Post, January 1, 1989...
...It is best to stay and do what I can to answer Chief Fulwood's appeal...
...There was a small business district, some tree-shaded streets of residences, a school, and a few churches...
...Why not leave this terrible problem behind and go to a Plainview or a Sand Prairie...
...Lately the thought of retreating from our big cities occurs more and more often to people like me who aren't held there by occupation...
...There were news reports last month that the county's biggest drug bust in history had been made in Sand Prairie, where two young men were caught with a stash of cocaine and a hoard of cash...
...It was the place where my aunt's farm neighbors shopped for clothes and staples, went to church, and sold their grain and livestock...
...I thought of this when two place names familiar to me from childhood appeared in the news recently-Plainview and Sand Prairie...
...Detectives find people shot with high-powered weapons, their bodies shattered...
...Although I looked forward to those summer Saturdays, Plainview seemed to me then a poky place with no prospect of excitement...
...I remember wandering the two-track roads looking for watermelons and musk-melons in the fall, and hiking through patches of frozen cornstalks in the winter...
...If the police experience burnout and despair, can I or my friends really do anything to help...
...The thin soil was good enough for the scattered, diversified farms with their stands of cottonwood and willow, small orchards, fields where the farmers grew corn, oats, and melons, and pastures where small herds of dairy cows grazed...
...They are drug-related and are paid for...
...On January 1, for example, Isaac Fulwood, Jr., deputy chief of police of Washington, D.C.-my city and, as the nation's capital, everyone's city-issued a desperate plea to us all...
...That means, he asserts, "that your life and mine has no value...
...For the most part, our ancestors in this country weren't given to the fanciful...
...If cocaine has come, crack (purified cocaine) is not far behind...
...It was pleasant and quiet...
...Sand Prairie was just what the name implies-a sandy prairie on the backwaters of the Mississippi south of my home town...
...Why not...
...Chief Fulwood says that in the past year, with the murder of 372 of its young people, our city has sent a message to the world that here a human life has no value...
...If I do all I can, then things will change...
...Cocaine has come to the corn fields," Sheriff Gudmilndson of Fill-more County told the Chicago Tribune...
...The lure of retreat has never been so strong...
...Plainview was the market town-the "Saturday night town"-of my childhood vacations on the farm...
...We are increasingly made aware that we live in war zones...
...They settled for the downright and the obvious...
...Last year, too, cocaine was discovered in Plainview-shipped in by United Parcel Service...
...On Saturday nights the broad main street was crowded with people in from the country to buy what they needed, and to visit with each other and catch up on the local news...
...The problem presented this way seems more frightening than ever...
...When it came to towns and identifiable sections of the countryside they often chose names of factual description...
...In 1988 there were 160 drug arrests in the nearby rural counties...
...There were a few hunters' cottages built near the river...
...What Chief Fulwood pleads for us to do is to make a personal commitment to stopping this war, to take the attitude that "it all starts with me...
...There is a growing element in the community, he says, whose callousness is hard to imagine.' 'They can go out, kill someone, then go home, go to bed, and go to sleep.'' But his homicide detectives can't sleep after what they have seen, and his police officers are overwhelmed...
...He told us that he and his detectives and officers could no longer cope without help...
...There is, I am forced to realize, no safe place...
...I see my officers suffering because they are fighting a war and losing...
...Ironically, because retreat is rapidly being cut off...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 3
