CITY & SUBURBAN LIFE

June 19, 2021

Cameras.

You're going to need cameras all around your home and property, because in city life residents live so close together that it's almost impossible for one neighbor not to encroach on another next-door or nearby. Some of these encroachments will be benign; others will not. For those in the latter category, when nearby residents have hurt you in one or more ways, you'll need to redress that situation, and the only way to ensure that your factual narrative is believed by those whom you need to believe it, such as a landlord, work manager, or police officer or municipal judge, is to prove your assertion. The most effective way to prove it is to let them see it, with their own eyes.

In my case, for example, over the last six months alone I've had two different landscapers blow leaves, dust, debris, and other assorted filth and detritus onto my property from their client's property. One is right next door; the other contiguously situated at the rear of our driveway. In both instances I watched the crime with my own two eyes.

If you have a big, bad or otherwise assertive Dad who can intervene, great. Many of us, don't.

Either way--get those cameras in place.

Over the years, we've been subject to other crimes, as well. Just last month saw what is perhaps the worst abuse that we've ever experienced:  some grossly misguided brother or sister, or perhaps more than one, slashed all four of our car tires. The fact that I caregive a 90 year-old woman, my Mother, and 1.) we depend on that vehicle for medical purposes, whether a trip to the pharmacy or the hospital, as well as grocery shopping and other tasks essential to her care, and that 2.) we're surviving on her Social Security income, alone, and therefore couldn't easily afford to purchase four new tires, didn't seem to deter this brother or sister, or duo or group.

If the brother or sister was angry, or upset, with me, all they had to do was speak with me--I'm sure we could have talked out the problem.

In calculating the scope of the injury done us, I wonder if the perpeTRAITOR figured the extra money it would cost us to begin keeping our lights on every night from then on, lighting our house up like a Christmas tree in order to deter crime such as this, and restore some semblance of the feeling of safety, again, as well as the cost of new security equipment of various kinds to be purchased and installed. The injury also includes the apprehension that my Mother, 90 years old, now feels at night, and, last, all the time that negotiating and implementing all these changes takes away from care of my Mother.

Ironically, this reprehensible act of violence further corroborates the principle thesis of my work:  this world has no meaningful ethic of Love, and is in desperate need of one. The third plank in my platform, which this act does not prove, but which I feel confident in asserting, is that were the world to formally implement an ethic of Love, properly understood, it would solve just about every human problem.

AN OBSERVATION ABOUT CRIME

Regarding crime itself, the observation Nature abhors a vacuum might apply. For example, in an unsecured environment, such as a residential property without a security system, a vacuum in that such a property is devoid (i.e. empty) of security, can and often does readily step something to fill it, usually other beings, whether human or non-human animal, or insect, with undesirable or otherwise unwanted motives or behaviors, that often adversely affect us, such as, in our case, the criminal imbeciles who slashed our tires, or the errant landscaper who continues to thinks to treat our property as his property, and trespass and cause other injury, accordingly. Indeed might they be the same person.

(Last season, for example, I witnessed him surreptitiously (so he thought) blowing a stream of leaves and debris into our driveway, from the property of his client, next door.)