The Danger We Can Confront
WASHINGTON -- Along came the alligator. A horrifying story at the end of a horrifying stretch, a heartbreaking coda befitting a nation on perpetual edge.
That the story would go viral was guaranteed: a 2-year-old grabbed, his father trying in vain to fight off the primordial beast, an unforeseen danger lurking in what is supposed to be the happiest place on earth.
It is human nature to be mesmerized by such a tale. In the early days of cable news, we could not avert our national gaze from Jessica McClure, the 18-month-old who fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in Midland, Texas. Baby Jessica's rescue was the subject of round-the-clock coverage during the 58 hours workers labored frantically to free her.
Decades before came the Lindbergh Baby, snatched from his crib at 20 months, his decomposed body found two months later, after a tabloid frenzy and a nationwide manhunt, just five miles from home.
These stories tug at the heartstrings but they also evoke our deepest insecurities -- that peril is omnipresent and vigilance unavailing, that happiness and security can evaporate in the unlucky happenstance of a fleeting moment.
You can be a random toddler in a scruffy backyard day care center or "the most famous baby in the world," as The New York Daily News called Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., put to bed by your nurse in your country mansion. No one is safe. You do not have to be a parent to suffer nightmares.
Which is why the timing of the alligator story magnified its impact. It hit an anxious nation already reeling from the massacre in Orlando. Unimaginable would be the word here except that these episodes -- San Bernardino, Charleston, Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech -- have become all too imaginable.
We glance at the news alert, then brace ourselves to learn in which bucket of evil and animus the latest belongs: who by airplane and who by anthrax; who by Islamic State sympathizer and who by racist skinhead; who by deranged loner and who by alienated co-worker.
The threat may not be existential, as President Obama likes to remind us, but that does not make it any less unsettling. The alligator lunging out of the bucolic pond is always scarier to contemplate than the fiery highway crash, even if the latter is far more likely.
Meantime, our national jitteriness is not solely a function of worries over terrorism or gun violence. We are a country on edge -- about America's role in the world, about the functioning of the American political system, and about the resilience of the American dream.
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Copyright 2016 Washington Post Writers Group
