If you missed Monday night’s trail safety meeting at the Lake Wilderness Lodge, I’m happy to give you the executive summary: the trails are safe, gangs haven’t taken root in the area, and we have a minor heroin problem.

Well, when I say “we”, I don’t mean me. And I also don’t mean you personally. If you’re reading the newspaper, it’s pretty likely you aren’t strung out on heroin. So the “we” refers to the naughty citizens lurking about in the shadows.

The gangs haven’t moved in to the shadows yet, though. The trail shooting incident in December was mostly due to an isolated dispute over who was in what gang, but it only happened in Maple Valley due to happenstance. The parents of those involved live in Maple Valley, and most of them still live with their parents.

Gangs aren’t working actively in our area; they’re just commuting to work from the suburbs.

The trail safety meeting gave us sheltered suburbanites a glimpse into the seedy underworld of both groups, in the anthropological sense. From the safety of the video screen, the King County Gang Unit detective enabled us to observe gang members in their natural habitats. We learned how to recognize them in the wild, how they organize and communicate, how to interpret their territorial markings and how to identify their droppings.

School officials assured us that drugs and gangs are not a problem in the schools. They may be right, since the teenagers I see dealing drugs in public appear to have the courtesy to work outside of the schools.

Overall, the meeting was designed to calm the hysterical masses, and it succeeded. The truth is, the trails are safe. Crime in general is rare on the trail. If you don’t count the knuckleheads in the woods shooting plastic pellet guns at each other for fun (technically a misdemeanor in Maple Valley), it’s very rare. The best advice? If you see something, say something. Call 911.

It was also great to see such a good turnout and such concern over an isolated incident. In most cities, people don’t care that much about a single shooting. I grew up in south Florida, where the crime rate is almost four times higher than here, per capita. A meeting like this would be unheard of down there.

I make cracks about us being sheltered suburbanites because I’m cynical inside, but at the same time I’m also envious of that sheltered feeling. The protective bubble we stay in keeps us from having to see the dark side of human nature, and the evil that we’re capable of. It’s a good thing, because we’re not able to handle all of the world’s bad news. Growing up in a higher-crime area popped my outer bubble years ago.

That’s why I have the utmost respect for police officers. They’re willing to pop their bubbles so that the rest of us can stay in ours. They deal with ugliness that would shock us to the core and haunt our dreams for years. When they take their personal time to come and speak to us, they’re giving us a small glimpse of the bad things that exist outside of the bubble, while assuring us that they are addressing the problems.

It’s a delicate conversation for them to have with us. People inside the bubble want to know that the bad things will be taken care of quickly and permanently. However, the reality is that our justice system has limited resources to prevent bad things from happening.

I’m just pointing out our bubble to show you that it exists. But I don’t want to pop it. It’s nice in there, and you usually don’t ever see the naughty people unless you turn on the local TV news.

Trust me; you don’t want to come out of your bubble. You won’t be able to get back in.