Note: My comments seem to be semi broken, you can comment but only if you hit preview first… I think…
On Friday I went by the site of the mugging before I hit the SODS SOAP extravaganza (more on that in a minute). I wanted to go there to make sure it didn’t get forever imprinted as a mythical place of danger in my mind and I wasn’t scared to be at the scene though I did make Eric come with me just in case I freaked out. And of course, the Xanax never hurts. It was really much closer to the corner than I remembered (I know I had just passed the doorway of the building there because I remember wondering about the way they constructed the entryway). That close to the corner really puts it in a truly public place. There must have been people getting gas right across the street. Eric asked if there were as many cars that day and I said no, there had been even more. He was shocked by the publicness of the place, and so was I. I still am. You know to stay out of dark alleys and you know not to walk in desolate places when no one is around, but on a bright sunny corner at rush hour on a major traffic artery in the City? No one really thinks that’s where you’ll get mugged and have a knife to your throat. Or that when you do, that only 4 people will care enough to call or talk to the cops.
It serves to teach me that violence is truly random - in its location as well as its intensity. That no matter what you do, you can’t escape it by doing all the "right" things, reacting the "right" way, or being in the "right" places. There is only one way I can think of to avoid this, and it is by knowing as many people as possible. I am lucky because I have an unusually large network of friends and acquaintances. The more people I know, the fewer there will be who want to hurt me (assuming I’m not a violent asshole myself, of course). So we can make more friends, and we can be positive influences when we’re able, and maybe that way we can cut the number of reasonable people who get hurt. I’m afraid the violent assholes will be on their own. Hopefully not running in packs like rabid dogs.
No matter how much I hate the whole hippy, love everyone stuff, I stand by my previous beliefs that the way to fix this (and a lot of other problems) is stop being us against them, and start thinking of them as us. How else will you get them to understand your point of view? And why should they bother? How can you demand someone accept you and your needs and your beliefs if you don’t accept theirs? I’ll grant that this isn’t always easy, and sometimes it isn’t even possible, some people are just nuts.