It is about a week since our house was robbed (the day of the burglary happening to be on my husband's birthday!), and the aftershock has been a veritable roller-coaster of feeling gratitude for our family escaping unscathed, confronting old feelings of jealousy I thought I'd learned to conquer, and pondering how theft and stealing fits into the larger ills of society and the grand scheme of things.
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
We are not sure exactly when the robbery happened, but it was either when we were at work or when we were at my husband's birthday dinner (what birthday present, eh?). Mr. Boof and I are relieved no one was home, and that our woozle (ironically named--seriously--Pootie) was unharmed as well (although the burglars locked him in our office). I am intensely grateful that Mr. Boof, Junior Boof, Little Boof, Pootie, and I all came out of the robbery unharmed and alive. We can always replace things, but not people or pets.
Sadly, the person who was arrested for the theft is a friend of one of Junior Boof's good friends (although not so good a friend anymore, it turns out). The cops arrested the kid, who is 15, lives in our neighborhood, and identified Junior Boof's "friend" (let's call him Anti-Boof, or AB) as tipping him off to what we had in the house, where we kept our "secret" key so he could just walk right in, and so on. The cops then talked with AB and his parents, and AB kept back-peddling and changing his story.
AB's parents are furious with him, and we've forbidden Junior Boof from having any contact with him. Not that he'd want to, anyway--Junior Boof feels very angry and betrayed. We had a long talk with him about the importance of friendship and how friends treat others well and don't violate their trust the way AB seems to have done. Little Boof was upset as well, and even slept with us in our queen bed on Monday night.
Because the perp is a minor, the police had a hard time securing a warrant, and the mom was not being cooperative at all. They finally did get a warrant to search, and the house is a veritable stockpile of stolen things. None of our things were recovered, except Mr. Boof's laptop, which they destroyed for some odd reason (why wouldn't they try hawking it somewhere?). Among the items that were stolen and haven't been recovered--to add insult to the injury of being robbed on his birthday--was Mr. Boof's new e-reader. It was not extravagant by any means, and was a lower-end one we had purchased both with our own money and a gift card from his dad, but it was his "big" birthday gift that he'd had for mere days.
As I wrote above, I am grateful that the perp and his network of thieves who've stockpiled other people's stolen belongings in their home just took things, and not people's lives. Yet the incident leaves a bad taste in my husband's and my mouths, and after talking it over with some of our other neighbors, leaves a bad vibe in the neighborhood as a whole. People want to be able to trust their neighbors and feel good about the communities in which they live, and it sucks when that trust is broken and one still has to live among the offending neighbor or neighbors and view them forever with suspicion.
We are fortunate that we do have good friends and neighbors who've reached out to us, checked in on us, and just been there for us in the past several days so we can vent in face time. Our struggling middle-class neighborhood overall, though, has seen signs of wear and an eroded sense of community in the past several years. Nearby homes have fallen into foreclosure and disrepair. Careless renters leave junk in their front yards and don't bother to pick up after their or their children's food wrappers or drink cans. Parents let kids play in the nearby playground till long after dark, when they can get themselves into trouble, or worse. Not to be paranoid, but don't the parents ever worry about kidnapping? Our kids think we are super-strict, making them come inside before dark, and having rules about when and where to play when they're outside the house, but the truth of the matter is that we care about where our kids are. It is strange and disappointing to me when your own neighbors don't seem to care about where their kids are, or what they are doing. Which is, at the very least, how a 15-year-old came to rob us in the first place.
But how did a 15-year-old come to rob us, or rob anyone, for that matter? Why do people rob, steal, break in, vandalize, cheat, lie, mug, beat up, shoot, stab, murder? I'm not asking this philosophically about the nature of humanity and evil, or even trying to imply a typical liberal copout "it's the economy, stupid!" excuse for just plain bad behavior. Yes, the economy may indeed drive people to the brink of desperation, but smuggling out cheap mac-and-cheese and ramen soup to fill your four-year-old's empty stomach is one thing, and breaking into your neighbor's homes to hoarde a bunch of laptops, Wii remotes, handheld gaming systems, and other electronic junk is another. What benefit can come from stealing another person's crap?
Doing bad comes from innate selfishness that goes from being a hidden emotion to a harmful action. Jealous emotion is one of my weakest faults; I admit I feel it every day, even today, even after feeling simultaneous gratitude toward simply having my family and friends and wonderful husband and kids in my life. I am a complex person, and as Ani DiFranco says, there's a crowd of people harbored in every person. Yes, I feel that nagging feeling of resentment toward others for having more than I have, for doing more than I have ever done, for being able to travel more when it's hard for our family to even save up for a getaway weekend these days. Yet I know myself, and I know I'm essentially a good person. I know that I can't always control what I feel and what I think, but I CAN control what I DO. That can be the difference between a good person and a bad person, and between a law-abiding citizen and a criminal.
Robbery comes from a selfish impulse to steal from another what one doesn't own already. The 15-year-old in our neighborhood acted upon a selfish impulse to stockpile his family's house with yet more gaming-console remotes and laptops that belonged to other people. The criminal who's sitting in our governor's mansion tonight acted on a selfish impulse to bilk seniors out of their healthcare accounts, to the tune of millions of dollars (yes, I live in Florida, in case you haven't guessed). Political office-holders (mostly Republican, to my memory) act on the selfish impulses to take power (and money) from people who've rightly earned their neighbors' votes. Our country went to war as a result of the selfish impulses of a small cadre of politicians and business owners (primarily weapons manufacturers and oil and gas companies) to steal what wasn't theirs from a country in which they had no business invading--and with their spoils were wasted countless human lives.
Ayn Rand is full of shit when she talks about the virtue of selfishness. Note to Paul Ryan and Rand's other accolytes: there IS no virtue in behaving selfishly.
I don't mean to wax philosophical about something so personal in a WYFP? diary, but quite often, the personal really IS political (to quote an oft-used clichè). Were it that less of us stole because we coveted something so badly that we needed to take it away, sometimes at all costs, from its owners, maybe we wouldn't be re-electing Republicans time and again, after all they've stolen from us. Maybe we wouldn't be in this mess we're in as a country to begin with.