Thinking back to eras gone by I breathe a sigh of relief and appreciate that I live in a time and place with anesthetic and running water and furnaces! But every once in a while I see a crack in this protective wall and I wonder how much of our Civilization is dependant on props and veneer.
I was reminded of this tonight when we made a call to the police to inform them that we had just heard a bit of a scuffle and large amounts of breaking glass. Perhaps it had merely been a vandalized car window or some hooligans ditching several dozen bottles of beer, but it seemed appropriate to call considering the block I inhabit. I’m not entirely convinced that the thugs in this neighborhood would attempt subtlety when endeavoring to gain access to a house without permission.
Sidenote: I feel like I need to rationalize my choice to live here in view of the frequency of my calls to the authorities. Living here has been a challenge, but I have confidence that the rejuvenation of this area is (slowly!) on its way.
That being said, we’ve called the non-emergency line on several occasions to report: garage break-ins (twice), kids intentionally rolling huge tires down church steps and into moving vehicles, young children climbing our garage and ripping the shingles off… right in front of us… despite the camera we had trained on them, and countless instances of plain vandalism. We’ve also called 911 to report garbage bin fires and a few domestic disturbances on behalf of a young man who lives down the street.
But tonight when we called emergency services suspecting that someone may be getting hurt, we got a busy signal. ?!? Now I have an alarm system, motion-sensitive lights, and great neighbors on each side, but when it comes right down to it, I am ultimately dependent on the police in dire situations. It’s frightening to call the line you are taught to trust, and to hear that discouraging “beep beep beep”.
Sidenote #2: The only time a police officer has come to our house was when Darren chased down a kid who had been throwing rocks at our front windows. And they came to give Darren s***! Someone had called 911 because “a man was running after a kid”, and, in her (loud) words, it was “definitely a race issue”. Yuck! Turns out the boy was just hanging out with the wrong crowd and he eventually came back and apologized to us. We (me, Darren, the cops and the boy) were all almost in tears when he asked if he could do some yard work to prove he was sorry for his lapse of better judgement.
I’m sure by now everyone has read about the unfortunate man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Unfortunately, his story is not very exceptional, and while not a daily occurrence, there are several news stories online about similar situations involving folks in “civilized” areas being trapped for hours, and even days, in elevators .
The crumbling façade here is that, in a number of the instances, there were numerous guards apparently monitoring the elevator camera feeds. That safety backup is something that I would rely on, but they must not have noticed that it was the same guy in the same elevator for those two long days.
There are so many things that we want to believe in, despite so much evidence that they are flawed: food processing plants, parental love, the sanity of fellow drivers! We have little choice but to continue to want to believe and to hope that our faith is not tested. I think I might on the wrong side of the tracks to be so optimistic…
