“It’s funny,” my friend Claire remarks at Lyshøjskolen, the Danish elementary school in Kolding, Denmark we are visiting with our class. “This project is about Americans and all of the Americans are freaking out about it.”
Her eyes pop as she imitates our faces. But she’s right. We are all quite surprised.
The school project we are marveling at is simple, done by second graders. Posters of the children dressed as cowboys with “WANTED” (written in English) and a dollar amount below them. But we’re still shocked. Every single child is holding a toy gun in the photos. Some are nonchalant about it, many point them at the camera. One kid even has his pointed at his own head.
These would never fly in America, we all agree at our class discussion.
“In Denmark, we’re not afraid of the pictures,” Alis Juncher, the head of the SFO (or after school program), explained to us when we asked her about the pictures.
Playing with fake guns, fake swords—it’s normal. And it gives you a chance to talk to the children about reality. Plus, she tells us, in Denmark there is no chance of a student accidentally finding a real gun and playing with it.
In the U.S., we are scared. As a girl puts it in our class, the U.S. is a “what if” society—what if we let children play with guns and they become more violent?—while Denmark is a “so what” society—so what if children play with guns. We’ll talk to them about it, deal with it, make sure they know shooting other people is not okay.
Our class discussions focused a lot on this difference. All of us, myself included, admired the Danish trust and scorned the American fear. I was surprised at how much this grated on me. I ended up writing a blog post about how when you are comparing cultures, even your own and another, context is everything. Americans aren’t scared for no reason.
We’re all still staring in shock at our TVs, asking each other, “Were they really just shot? Is this real?”
We know it’s impossible or unfeasible to no longer have guns in America. So we speak in hushed tones about them, we prevent our children from playing with imitations of them. We’re scared. But, I write, we aren’t scared completely senselessly. Americans are less trusting than the Danes because our society is actually less safe than theirs.
I hit post and share the link to my blog post about why we need to keep context in mind when judging Americans for being scared on Facebook. I go to the living room, and tell my host mom I’m leaving for the night.
She looks up.
“There’s been a shooting in Østerbro. Didn’t you hear?” she says.
I hadn’t. We talk for a few minutes about it and then I leave to go out with my friends. We’re in line for a club when all of a sudden the whole line seems to be buzzing. There’s been another shooting. Nørreport station. We were there an hour ago.
Inna Shevchenko, the woman who was speaking when the first shots were fired, tweeted that “there is no longer such a thing as ‘safe Europe’” at 9:14 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, hours after the first attack, minutes after the second. People retweeted and commented, agreeing with her, saying that there never was.
I hope with all my heart that the Danes will not start to think their country is no longer safe. I hope they will continue to be able to say they are not afraid of pictures, that they know children will not be able to find guns to play with. I hope that they will continue to trust. That terrorists will not steal that uniquely Danish feeling from them.
My host mom told me on Sunday that if I were her daughter she would not have let me go out on Saturday night. It’s the first time since I’ve been in Copenhagen that someone has expressed even the slightest worry about my safety.
As I’m heading home Sunday night, two policemen walk by. They’re armed, with big guns. Did you see that? Did you see that? the train buzzes, the worry of the citizens practically tangible.
Americans are scared because of our history, our past, our present. There have been too many John F. Kennedys and too many Trayvon Martins not to be fearful. We may be overreacting with our zero tolerance policies, our complete ban on children’s toys, our incredibly armed police forces. But we’ve all seen too many pictures of dead men and women, shot down on our streets, not to be afraid of pictures.
I hope the Danes will continue to trust each other, continue to feel safe in their cities and continue to feel safe speaking their minds. I hope they never develop a context to be as scared of pictures as we are. I hope that all the Danish cowboys will continue to have guns and all the Danish policemen won’t.
Shelby Ostergaard is a junior in the School of Public Affairs
