Listen HereBy: Cory Berlekamp
Email: Berlekampc@findlay.edu
This last semester was very eventful for me. I took my first steps in to working with the Findlay Floods Project, I bought a $700 camera and I was almost in a terrorist attack.
I was finishing up my final projects in the computer lab at Egner during the last week of classes when I received a text from my friend saying “my sister is a terrorist.” Needless to say I hadn’t heard about that yet or I would be texting him that so I hopped on the internet to check the news only to find another a surprise.
The girl that was arrested was familiar to me but not because of my friend, because she was a patron of the bar that I work at, The Attic on Adams. Elizabeth Lecron’s main objective was to cause basic mayhem at a second story bar in Toledo, Ohio and goes without saying that my place of work involves stairs. She was caught with an AK-47, shotguns, handguns, and end caps used in making pipe bombs.
I was speechless in the way that one could imagine. Before I go any further, it has been reported that The Attic was probably not the main objective. That does not stop the fact the feeling that I may have dodged a literal bullet.
Over the past couple of years, the country has become increasingly on edge over the fear of mass shootings and terrorist attacks. From the Pulse Nightclub to Las Vegas to Parkland, these senseless acts of violence enter are our houses through bursting veins and broken hearts. They are reported, explained, and then argued about on the 24-hour news cycle by talking heads and politicians. After the waves recede, the rest of the country retreats to their daily lives while the broken families and survivors have to live in that moment for however long it takes them to come to peace.
This is where my mind went after the texts from my family came in asking me about it. Not that I could have been riddled with three-inch-long nails flying from a pipe bomb but how this just is something that happens now. It can happen anywhere, the number of childless parents and parentless children are growing and catching the perpetrator before it happens is all but certain.
Am I afraid to go in to work now? Not really, just like I am not afraid to come down to school here at the University of Findlay. I am vulnerable everywhere according to these scenes and experiences. But I refuse to walk around with a target on my back waiting to punch out my last time card. I am a little more cautious and wary of individuals but through the right lens anyone can look like the enemy. I can only hope that we as a country start to make actual changes rather than wait for the next cycle.
I don’t want to be on the front page of a national paper before I receive my degree in journalism.
