Reflecting on things you realized after leaving your parents’ home and fending for yourself, what are some ways you were sheltered from

aspects of real-life experiences or real-life events?

  One of my personal examples is that I never knew a thing about street gangs and the violence they exacted on the city I was raised in and especially not in the neighborhood where I grew up and in the schools I had attended all my life.  I left that city at age 18 and never lived there again. I was well beyond age 30 or 35 when I began to learn a lot about the origin of street gangs in the US dating back to the early 1900s but exploding during Prohibition (1920 to 1933). Due to an almost uneventful upbringing in regard to crime in general and gang activity in particular, I thought that the problem occurred on “other” places. I soon found out that my hometown (which is a large metropolitan city) was just as much inundated with street gangs as Chicago, Saint Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, etc. It turns out that there were several thousand gang members who belonged to dozens of rival and allied gangs in my very city the entire time I had lived there, some lived on the very block where I grew up. Turf wars and jockeying for position in drug sales, prostitution, fencing of burglary/robbery loot and gun-running were rampant right under my nose, but I had never known about it.
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