“Am I safe? What can I do? Where do we go from here?” Dr. Richard P. Keeling asked an audience of students and faculty on Wednesday evening in an event for Health, Safety and Justice Week. Keeling, who is the editor of the American Journal of College Health, compared the events of Sept. 11 and pressing campus health and safety issues.
“The most important thing about the events of Sept. 11 is that it was not like anything we had seen before,” Keeling said. “We are Alice down the rabbit hole?we discovered a parallel universe on the other side of our dreams,”Keeling said.
The most common conclusion about Sept. 11 is that it brought people together, Keeling said. He said that the nation is united in the belief that there is a problem, but not in the search for a solution.
Keeling said that the Georgetown community faces a similar problem with campus drinking.
According to Keeling, in a survey conducted in 2000, 98 percent of Georgetown students responded that they would aid a person who had had too much alcohol. He said that the University attributed this statistic to the strength of the Georgetown community.
People must realize that most health risks come from members of the community and then decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to aid others, Keeling said.
“It is easier for us to think about people falling out of towers due to terrorist attacks than to consider that we cause our own risks,” Keeling said. “Sometimes you must increase personal tension in order to decrease tension in the community,” he said.
