Last night, I found myself watching "The Conjuring 2" in theaters. As the type of person who at age 18 still sleeps with a nightlight, and occasionally checks for monsters under her bed, I knew before I left my house that I would spend the next two hours terrified. And in fact I spent a good portion of that movie with one hand clutching my best friend and the other an over-sized bag of kettle chips, but not for the reason I had initially thought. I walked into the theater shaking. All I could think about was that any scary movie in which I need to show identification before I entered would be chilling. I sat down towards the back and began preparing myself for the psychological torture I was about to endure. Halfway through the film, when it became a little too much for me to stomach, I started looking around the theater. I saw couples who were clearly using this movie as an excuse to get closer to one another, preteens who had sneaked in and looked to be regretting that decision and one man in the corner standing on his own.
This man wasn’t doing anything threatening. He didn’t appear to be holding anything, in fact he was doing the most mundane thing a human could do. He was just standing there, leaning against a wall watching the movie. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, and for the remainder of the movie I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Why wouldn’t he sit down? What was he planning? As I left the theater walking past him in the lobby I started to question myself, why did it bother me so much that he was standing? That is when I realized the sad reality of the world we live in.
Anything can happen at any moment. Schools, restaurants, theaters, any place can become a crime scene in a matter of minutes. Anyone can be a victim. Lately it feels as if every time we turn on the news someone somewhere has committed a horrific crime. Those kids who sneak in to R-rated horror films simply don’t have to anymore because they can just turn on any news station or look at any headline. Maybe we shouldn’t stop children from engaging with this genre of cinema because its no worse than the realities they face every time they watch the morning news with their parents. Maybe movies like this could offer us all some relief because at the very least its fictional, at the very least someone’s daughter or son, wife or husband, isn’t enduring it as the details unfold before us. At the very least we don’t have to go about our day to day lives thinking that we could be next.
Does this mean we should live our lives in constant fear? Absolutely not. While awareness is important in safety it is not the duty of the civilian to adjust their lifestyles to avoid being the victims of crimes. Rather it is the duty of perpetrators to control their actions. A majority of the heinous crimes we hear about on a daily basis are motivated by hate. We can’t let the hate in the hearts and minds of others dictate how we live our lives. Can we completely obliterate hate from out world? I’m not sure. But I do know that we have the power to control how the hate of others affects us. In hindsight I can recognize that I judged that man with absolutely no foundation. He was merely standing in the back of a theater but in my head he was a violent criminal with elaborate plans to take us all down. I let the hate that I have seen and read about cloud my judgment and overcome my thoughts. We may not be able to stop every criminal, but we can redirect how we let their actions impact us.
