You can't live your whole life in fear.
I live in northern Virginia, a ten-minute (outside of rush hour) drive to the White House. I have also lived in DC and Maryland. In my decades here:
- a few years after I worked as a temporary in the DC prosecutor's office, a guy walked in and killed five people
- My date and I were walking back to the car in a parking lot (long built over) in Georgetown when somebody began shooting at the people in a nearby car. We ran like hell, me in heels, and then called the cops. A few days later, a woman called both me and my date, saying that she was the mother of the boys being shot at. My roommates would not allow her to speak to me. The cops must have given her my number. Unsettling.
- I used to drive to work in DC, but I hesitated to go in on 9/11. My route to work included the road next to the Pentagon on the side that the plane came in
- then there was the sniper, whom everyone thought was in a white box truck. You ducked when you got gas. I quickly went to the gas station because some poor guy had just been killed in Fredericksburg and I knew that the sniper had to be stuck in traffic on 95 because the police were stopping everything.
- Richard Spencer showed up in the neighborhood a year or two ago
- somebody distributed KKK literature and candy in a local neighborhood in the dead of night, so we have night creepers
- there have been attacks on churches and mosques
- there has been all of that business in DC, a few rioters out of the thousands who have marched, and some trumpsters acting out, stealing signs and causing fights
- the cretins who attacked Congress on Jan. 6 stayed in motels around here, and I heard that some of them were bringing in high-powered weapons. Some of them even talked about taking weapons across the Potomac by boat.
But I grew up in Jersey a few miles from the George Washington Bridge. During the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis we youngsters were taught to duck and cover. If somebody nuked NYC, we would be cooked as well.
You just have to shake it off and learn to duck.
I like cities. There is always something interesting to do or just hang out with friends at some outdoor cafe.