COLUMN: It's really not that dangerous here
I grew up in a small college town. There was the occasional murder, mostly caused by domestic violence, and of course, the students tended to party too hard.
However, Mount Pleasant was a great town to grow up in.
Fast-forward 10 years to college, and there's been murders, abductions, rapes and a number of other disturbing crimes.
Overall, not a whole lot has changed in the town – except for my ability to interpret and digest the news. As a society, we demand our news right now. We live in the information age with everything we could ever want to know right at our finger tips.
When something happens, like the murder of Tyrone Stanley downtown or the abduction of a Central Michigan University student at the Student Activity Center, we get a news alert.
"This happened! We'll have the full story soon."
We have our friends texting us or posting on social media – "OMG! I can't believe this happened! I live like two blocks from there!"
We're still learning to take our news with a grain of salt, because not everything we read is true or accurate.
We tend to get our news immediately. We have access to the breaking stories through Twitter, Facebook, texting and email unlike previous generations. We are constantly bombarded with new and developing stories that don't have the full story to tell yet. It's a curse of the information age.
In 2012, there were three homicides. Tyrone Stanley, Rebekah Gay and Carnel Chamberlain all lost their lives, and we knew about those incidents immediately. Our hearts ached for the families as they were recovering from the news themselves.
In 2013, memorable news stories included the abduction of a CMU student and the CMU student who poisoned her roommate's iced tea for not doing the dishes.
These are all isolated incidents. They happened months apart, but we knew about them immediately. Without the Internet, texting and other forms of mass communication, we'd be in the dark until tomorrow's paper came out.
Some may argue that Mount Pleasant has become more violent, citing the three murders in 2012 as something unordinary, but I am still of the mind that we are just getting older. We are learning more about our society and we have the information more readily available.
Mount Pleasant is a small town. Our population doubles when the semester begins. With a ton of people in a small area, there is bound to be the occasional dispute. Most of these incidents are from locals.
I firmly believe Mount Pleasant is still a very safe place. It's the same town I grew up in. It's still home, and the people here are still going to fight no matter what. We're just getting the information as soon as it happens, and that can freak some people out.
