During the past week our usually quiet and placid block of this prairie city was rocked by an earthquake and a home invasion. Both are almost unheard of around here, and therefore unlikely to reoccur, but that’s only contributed to what was already an unsettling sense of uncertainty about the state of the world.
The earthquake was minor and momentary and caused no reported damage, but it was sufficient to rattle our rolling chair and then our nerves. It wasn’t so bad as the one that happened late last year, which was several seconds longer and so much stronger it shook the lamp fixtures, but it was all the more unnerving because it was happening a second time. We had lived more than a half century on the plains before experiencing an earthquake, and our childhood education included annually rehearsed instructions on what to do in case of tornadoes but no one had ever bothered to tell us how to respond an earthquake, so the idea that this might now be a regular event seemed yet another irksome thing to worry about. All the local lefties are blaming it on the hydraulic fracking for oil and natural gas that’s been going on down in Oklahoma, which we cannot disprove, but we are reassured to note that on that same day fracking was going on in places where there weren’t earthquakes and earthquakes were happening where there wasn’t any fracking, Some sort of end times scenario from the Book of Revelation seems at least as a likely, and if human agency isn’t involved we will be glad.
The home invasion that happened just across the street and a couple of doors down cannot be blamed on anything other than humans, which makes it all the more threatening. We first heard about it on the local talk radio station, with the mention of our neighborhood and our street and our block piquing our attention, and then got the rest of the details from a couple of alarmed neighbors. It seems the 60-year-old woman at the home was chatting with a 50-year-old woman friend when two men burst through the door wielding handguns, forced the women into a bathroom while ransacking the house for a small amount of cash and booty, then sped away into the night. A few years back the “Riverside Rapist” terrorized women in the neighborhood for several months until he was apprehended, and since then the occasional bike has been swiped from a back porch and the police have been infrequently dispatched to adjudicate the domestic disputes that happen in even the best neighborhoods, but otherwise the violent crime seemed anomalous. Our fashionably old-fashioned neighborhood isn’t so swank that a criminal would expect to find an especially risk-worthy reward here, and it’s the sort of well kept and seemingly solid area that the Broken Windows Theory predicts will deter crime, but it’s still not possible to believe that it can’t happen here.
The neighborhood is so fashionably old-fashioned that it’s become a liberal enclave in this otherwise conservative city, with a conspicuous number of hipsters and homosexual and other childless households, and the vast majority of yard signs that pop up every election season advertising that the homes probably aren’t protected by a firearm, and we suspect the crime is even more discomforting to our neighbors. The two we spoke with about the crime are both single women, who rightly suspect that such cowardly criminals are more likely to target a home without a male, but they still seemed embarrassed to divulge the pertinent information that the men who invaded their neighbor’s home were black. Another man who also happened to be black was recently spotted on another neighbor’s porch late at night, both women told us, and they apologetically advised that that we be lookout for similar activity. We noted that the recent spate of ideal weather had drawn large numbers of homeless people to the picturesque riverbanks that border the neighborhood, and that their number had lately spilled into the streets, and both women acknowledged the same concern with an apparent sense of guilt. Riverside doesn’t like to believe that race and homelessness can ever be predictive of criminal behavior, and being forced to do so upsets the certainties that people rely on.
As wised-up right-wing bastards we have no compunction about regarding the saggy-pantsed black men or the old men carrying their belongings in a shopping cart with some suspicion when they appear on our lily-white and middle-class street, and we have a white male’s privilege in knowing that knowing that invading our home carries a slightly higher and probably effective risk of anyone on the street invading our home, but there’s no shaking a sense that everything is a little less certain. Deadly diseases that we once thought were confined only to the most third world regions of Africa are now in a Dallas hospital. The people of Moore, Oklahoma, once thought that of all the many things they had to worry about beheadings by radical Islamists were not of concern. It was once unthinkable that the Internal Revenue Service would be used to harass an administration’s political enemies, or that people who millennia-old definition of marriage would be denied employment opportunities because of their opinions, or that our country would be at war while the politicians refused to call it that, or that a Republican Senator in Kansas would would find himself in danger of not being re-elected. Each days’s perusal of the Drudge Report reveals another story we never thought would have happened, and the comments sections at each story has responses we never thought we’d hear, and it’s getting harder to think of anything we can be certain about.
The door is locked and weapons are ready in the unlikely case of a home invasion, and we’re boned on what to do in the even more unlikely case of the earth shaking until the buildings collapse, and the rest of it we’ll just have to get used to. God and guns and our own abilities are still certainties in life, and we’ll bitterly cling to them.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 