By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles. – Jean Toomer
What happened at the Old West End Festival was not just gun violence. It was an invitation to be afraid. And right now, Toledo is deciding whether to accept it.
That is the decision nobody is naming. Not the mayor. Not the governor. Not the councilmembers who have offered their grief and their policy proposals. They are answering a different question — what do we do about the shooting?
The harder question is: what do we do about the fear the shooting was designed to produce?
The Invitation
Terror does not require a manifesto. Nor is it always accompanied by an ideology or a foreign flag. Essentially, terror works like this: you do not have to shoot up every festival. You just have to shoot up one. And the rest will cancel themselves.
That is fear’s invitation. Stay home. Don’t celebrate. Don’t meet or show up. Don’t assemble to raise money for a local organization or nonprofit serving the public good. But rather, let the public square empty out — not because someone ordered you to leave, but because you decided the risk wasn’t worth it. Fear is an enemy that does not need a gunman at every corner. It just needs enough people doing that math.
And Toledo has been doing that math for weeks, so much so that we have acquired an international reputation for all the wrong and embarrassing reasons. A near-panic at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Festival over an airsoft gun. Police officers cursing at children on a street corner. Adults brawling at kindergarten graduations. Each incident arriving as an isolated story but revealing a chilling pattern — a city absorbing distressing blow after blow, calculating its exposure, and quietly beginning to retreat.
About the Response
Everyone, predictably, has offered the obligatory thoughts and prayers, including the governor, mayor and councilmembers. Some public officials have expressed outrage and even promised legal vengeance. Many others have taken the easy way out by only assigning blame. All good people, genuinely grieved. But the invitation to be afraid is still on the table.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz wants to “rethink” large public events — metal detectors, curfews, bag checks and age verification at the gate. Understandable. But if the answer to this invitation is to make every festival feel like a TSA checkpoint, then the medicine starts to look like the disease. Safety measures definitely have their place. But what we cannot let happen is two people with a private grievance hold Toledo’s public life hostage. The question is not only how do we prevent the next shooting. It is how do we refuse to let this tragic incident determine how we live.
The Answer to the Invitation
Fear is not unreasonable right now as the people who shot up that arboretum are still out there —three days in, no arrests.
But there is a difference between fear that makes you careful and fear that makes you a prisoner. One keeps you wise. The other keeps you home and confined. And home is exactly where Toledo’s summer goes to die if we let it.
The city’s festival season is just beginning. Watershed Weekend is ahead. The Fourth of July is ahead. Every outdoor gathering between now and Labor Day is Toledo’s answer to the invitation — a declaration, made in public, that this city’s streets and parks and arboretums belong to the people who live here, not to whoever showed up last Saturday with a gun and a grievance.
Show up. Bring your family. Be wise, be aware, and be sensible about where you go and when. But show up. Because the only answer to an invitation to be afraid is a community that refuses it.
They want you to stay home. Don’t!
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org