Crime and Etiquette

I tend to be a fearful person. I am apprehensive about things that seem to wrest all control from me: airplanes, diseases, mannerisms, and especially criminals. It is my gloomy conviction that to reside anywhere, but particularly in a big city, requires that you wrap yourself and your routines in a protective vigilance against crime-a caution so hermetic that it becomes, in its own way, as repressive as the ill-will and rapacity around you. Craven people like me will not only take pains to avoid personal attack; they will also rehearse it from time to time, plotting appropriate strategies of resistance for some imaginary crisis. Evening strolls. become, on occasion, simulated combat exercises, wherein potential aggressors are detected and (invariably) thwarted.

These street-fantasies of mine, whatever their strategic value, have always seemed to immunize me against actual crime. Until recently, that is, when I became the victim of a noonday mugging on my own threshold: my real innocence of these matters was forever lost to an adolescent who had the delicacy to assure me that he didn’t. Want to hurt me. All he wanted was The Money. I acquitted myself rather well in the bout, losing the cash but retaining my identification cards and gaining the assurance that I was capable of a throaty scream when the occasion arose.

SM

About the Author

Susan Schwartz McDonald

Featured Tags

Manage following

Crime

Manners

I tend to be a fearful person. I am apprehensive about things that seem to wrest all control from me: airplanes, diseases, mannerisms, and especially criminals. It is my gloomy conviction that to reside anywhere, but particularly in a big city, requires that you wrap yourself and your routines in a protective vigilance against crime-a caution so hermetic that it becomes, in its own way, as repressive as the ill-will and rapacity around you. Craven people like me will not only take pains to avoid personal attack; they will also rehearse it from time to time, plotting appropriate strategies of resistance for some imaginary crisis. Evening strolls. become, on occasion, simulated combat exercises, wherein potential aggressors are detected and (invariably) thwarted.

These street-fantasies of mine, whatever their strategic value, have always seemed to immunize me against actual crime. Until recently, that is, when I became the victim of a noonday mugging on my own threshold: my real innocence of these matters was forever lost to an adolescent who had the delicacy to assure me that he didn’t. Want to hurt me. All he wanted was The Money. I acquitted myself rather well in the bout, losing the cash but retaining my identification cards and gaining the assurance that I was capable of a throaty scream when the occasion arose.