For the most part, Emporia is a fairly safe place to live. When we first moved here we were amazed that if the plumber or electrician was working in the house, you could go off and leave them all alone with no repercussions. They would lock up after they were done and send you a bill later. Everything here in Emporia operated on the trust system.It is the kind of town where the neighbors watch out for each other, sometimes to a fault. We left town one weekend several weeks ago and told the uncle of a friend of ours that they could stay here while they were in town for a funeral. We neglected to tell our neighbors across the street the plans and when the uncle and family arrived after it was dark, the comedy of errors ensued.
We had not left the porch light on so they were not sure how to get in the house. They began by walking to the back of the house by flashlight. That is what our neighbors saw, so they called the police who arrived and startled our guests. It was eventually all sorted out and we learned to let our neighbors know about any unusual comings and goings.
For the most part, violent crimes here in Emporia are non-existent. The last murder was in 2014, so that is why the events of the past week have taken many of us by surprise. Surprise that violence can be among us. Surprise that life can be so fragile. Surprised that life can be so short.
Some would say we all need to be fearful and vigilant because life here in the United States is becoming more violent, but that is not the case. The state wide murder rate in Kansas was 4.0 per 1000 people in 1967 and fifty years later is 4.4 per 1000. That mirrors the overall rates in the United States which were 4.0 in 1967 and are now 4.5 per thousand.
The truth of the matter is we are not more angry or violent than we were fifty years ago, but we are much more desperate. We are losing more and more citizens to drug overdoses every day. The nationwide number of overdose deaths per 1000 is at an all-time high of 14. That means over 58,000 people lost their lives to drugs in the U.S last year. Kansas did not fare that much better as we lost 11.7 of 1000 people to drugs in 2016, a statistic which is even higher than California which counted 11.4 deaths due to overdoses.
The suicide rates are just as frightening as the drug overdose statistics. In the most recent statistics. Kansas experienced a suicide rate of 16.1 per thousand. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, one American dies by suicide every 12.3 minutes.
If you add up all of the statistics for Kansas, 32 Kansans out of every thousand will die this year from either murder, drugs or suicide. That is too many of our citizens to lose for totally preventable reasons.
Although the current political climate sometimes threatens to drive every one of us mad, you can’t blame all of our national angst on politics. While I think that the overall toxic environment has something to do with the situation there is something more debilitating at play.
We have lost hope. We have stopped giving others hope and stopped hoping ourselves. Our lives have become measured by indices that provide absolutely no real measurement of our worth. We are concerned with the number of friends on Facebook or our followers on Twitter. Our worth is validated by the number of likes we get on a post and invalidated by snarky comments from people we have never met in person. We are valued by the size of our house or the car we drive; by the vacations we have taken and the places we have been. It’s all what we’ve experienced and what we have.
What about what we’ve done for others? Is that even considered in our measurement of self-worth? When was the last time we even smiled or said hello to a stranger? When have we shed tears for someone we didn’t know, someone’s whose life was cut short?
The lyrics to the song “No Man is an Island” are once more ringing through my head:
No man is an island,
No man stands alone,
Each man’s joy is joy to me,
Each man’s grief is my own.
We must always remember that everyone’s life is significant. Everyone’s death is a loss to all of us.