What I didn’t tell her about was my friend whose daughter was molested by a man who climbed in through her bedroom window one night. My friend thought her daughter must have had a nightmare until she found an overturned bucket outside her window the next morning. Fingerprints on the bucket matched those of a man recently released from prison. Never again would she sleep with the windows open to enjoy a mild night’s breeze.
Nor did I tell her about the time several years ago that I sat in my mom’s living room listening to helicopters flying back and forth over and over again. My mom said she believed they were searching for a missing teenage girl. Later we saw a flood of law enforcement vehicles speeding down her road. The 17-year-old girl’s body had been found in a field less than a mile from my mom’s house. She had been abducted in a grocery store parking lot that I had been in many times. She had been raped and murdered.
We see stories like these repeated in loops on the cable news channels all the time. Sometimes the stories hit too close to home.
A block of voters referred to as “security moms,” married women with children who were concerned about the threat of terrorism, helped Republicans win in 2002 and 2004. Although the threat of terrorism is as real today as it was then, the security moms of this election cycle might be as likely to look to their leaders to protect their children from the online predators they see Dateline NBC catch on hidden camera as from terrorists intent on jihad.