> > Yes, I think it is natural for people to be more afraid now than before the September 11 attacks. Sadly, though, human nature - the aspect of it that leads men to shoot random children - has always been like this.
> >
> > Gahalia
>
> Human nature has also always provided people who help. It helps me to remember that in the face of awful things.

This seems like a good place to mention our own current news headline, and some of the things it has made me think about. Fifteen years ago, a little girl was abducted while walking to school. This story did not have a happy ending. DNA samples were taken from the little girl's body, but the science was in its infancy and the criminal was never found. Until now. Retesting with new technology has identified the man and brought him to justice.

The newspaper for the last few weeks has been full of interviews with people who saw little Theresa on her last day alive. People saw her walking with a strange-looking man. People saw her getting into a car with him. People had seen him earlier, sitting in a car outside the school, looking weird and creepy. These people invariably described him as evil-looking, or disturbing, or that they got a "weird feeling" about him, or that they thought it odd he would be in the company of a child like Theresa.

And not one of them did anything about their disturbance, their weird feelings, their presentiment of evil.

Now I'm getting to the point of why this fits in with Cynthia's post. My intention is not to blame these particular witnesses for not taking action. Before the Theresa Cormack case, people in this country didn't think about the possibility of such things. Six-year-olds could be sent off to walk to school alone and nobody thought twice about it. And I'm sure all those people have been thinking of nothing else but what they might have done, if they had only known.

What all these articles made me think about is that these people *did* know. They just didn't believe their knowledge was valid. People generally do not think it's justified to act on a sense of disturbance. We're taught not to rely on our gut instincts. But that's what our gut instincts are *there* for. Instinct is a convenient word for our sense of self-preservation, our cue from all the little sensory signals we're not consciously aware of, that *something is wrong*. A weird feeling about a situation isn't something that requires us to look for evidence of danger -- it IS evidence.

Nobody wants to look like an idiot if they're wrong, or be thought rude and nosy. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe people will laugh at us, or press charges. The reports which continue to surface in the news relating to this case are a very sad reminder that sometimes, in fact I would have to say *every* time, you really, really, really need to act on a sense of disturbance, and to hell with whether you look like an idiot. Even if you end up looking like an idiot nine times out of ten, the tenth time might have been Theresa.