2023-09-23 05:01:00
It was a July night, around 9 p.m., in front of the Autóctono park, in the city of Córdoba. Suddenly screams from a girl were heard in one of the surrounding streets; more precisely, on the corner of Giménez Pastor and Gregorio Vélez.
“They are robbing a house!” the young woman shouted, desperate, while pointing towards one of the houses, half a block away. “Call the Police!” She cried.
The four people who were passing by looked at each other: no one managed to take out their phone. The reason: no one had it.
The four of us had gone for a walk around that green space. But, as for several years now, when we do that we leave our cell phones at home.
A few seconds later, the thieves calmly left the broken home, with the loot in their backpacks, and fled quickly on a motorcycle.
In this way, the perfect circle of daily life of insecurity was completed: the consequences of living that way become, in turn, causes that make it more difficult to combat it.
Aspirational briefcase
You haven’t seen anyone with briefcases on the street for years. The old leather goods stores must have accumulated a monumental stock of these elements, which were previously used by students, merchants and professionals from various areas.
No one in their right mind would think of walking around with that walking invitation to outburst now. Even without valuable content, those leather artifacts were usually quite expensive.
I keep a useless collection of those briefcases, obtained as birthday gifts, as a gift upon receiving me or as a courtesy from some uncle who expected for me a destiny of suits and offices that, unfortunately for him, did not happen.
There were black and brown ones. Flexible and hard. With and without double bottom. With a normal lock or with those in which you had to combine numbers. What’s more: I was never able to open one because I forgot the combination.
It could be said that it was an aspirational element that gave an air of prestige that fanny packs or backpacks do not provide, much safer but less elegant.
I feel sorry for throwing them away; I have doubts about keeping them; I’m not even going to use them.
glass block
The block I live on is usually decorated with glass on the sidewalk. They are the broken windshields of cars from which everything inside is stolen, in addition to the spare wheels.
The ornament of these pulverized pieces remains on the sidewalk until, once a week, the street sweepers remove them.
Meanwhile, they are a permanent reminder of what happens in that area when we leave a car parked next to the curb. Who would think of such atrocity?
Times when this happens? Any. Days? Any.
No one leaves their cars parked outside at night anymore. This is a guarantee that they will wake up without a spare wheel, in the best of cases, or with two blocks of bricks holding the vehicle in the missing space left by two wheels.
The last two evening gatherings I hosted at my home – one for friends, one for co-workers – ended with one of the guests’ cars without windows and without help.
Since then, I avoid organizing meetings at my house. It was the last stronghold that he expected to lose: that of socialization and community life as a host happy to receive close people.
The alternative was to ask them to come by another means of transportation. But I was not successful. Some are too comfortable, others do not want to use the urban bus system and the rest have an excessive attachment to the money they would spend on a taxi.
By the way, I should ask myself if the problem is insecurity or the quality of my friends. Better not to find out.
Mi MP3
When I go out into the outside world for any reason other than work, I avoid carrying a cell phone, computer, documents, cards, money that is not strictly necessary, wallet or keys. This last element is essential, so every time I go out, I take out only the main door key from the key ring, so that it can be transported inside the stocking.
I also don’t go out running or walking with new sneakers – in fact, I choose the worst ones – so if on those occasions I were to run into someone I knew, they would see a kind of linewoman wandering aimlessly.
When I have to run alone, the only way to kill boredom is music. But since I can’t go out with a cell phone, I resort to my old MP3, the green ones shaped like a cherry and a little gray screen with black letters. You can load two entire albums or three, if they have few songs.
Keeping it healthy is an art: between service and maintenance, I must have spent the equivalent of a mid-range cell phone. But no one approaches with the intention of taking him away.
Home customs
Since one of the robberies at my house occurred immediately after they saw me leaving the garage, I have long had to take certain precautions to leave in peace.
The first, never go out if there are people hanging around outside. Sometimes I leave up to half an hour later than planned, waiting for those people to leave.
Read as you write it, you realize the madness: they may be the most harmless and honest people in the world, but the distrust generated after receiving one of those blows does not dissipate easily.
Furthermore, riding a car – a relatively simple and automatic activity, even for those who learned to drive with gears – requires a series of considerations, without which we would be easy targets for crime.
Leave the aid at home – except for road trips; buy and install lock nuts; pay outrageously high insurance; install volumetric alarms; Spending fortunes in parking lots and fighting with naranjitas are already part of the driving habit.
Alarm layers
The house I live in accumulates different geological layers, which add up after each robbery.
The first layer is that of the vertical square bars, which were twisted to the sides the first time they broke in.
The second is that of the horizontal bars attached to these bars, to prevent them from being twisted.
The third is the addition of new bolts to the iron doors that lead to the patio, so that more locks can be placed on them.
The fourth is the new locks, installed after the theft of the bunch of keys that was in the car one of the two times the spare tire was stolen.
The fifth is the new sensors added to the old alarm, so sensitive now that they wake me up every night when the wind exceeds five kilometers per hour. Luck indicates that the day you disconnect them so you can sleep peacefully, it will be just when someone breaks in to steal.
And so we resign ourselves to losing, in addition to tranquility, the quality of sleep.
The last layer is external: that of the neighborhood security service, which is equivalent, neither more nor less, to resigning oneself to privatizing a basic State service – the last public service that a society should agree to privatize.
To make matters worse, this is not a guarantee that the thefts will stop or change, but only a temporary safeguard for when the people who pay for it enter or leave your home. It’s almost like paying a toll to enter our own gates.
Liar debate
The fact that my house, the block and the neighborhood in which I live are a grain of sand in the sea of citizen insecurity is not only no consolation, but it multiplies the concern.
Even the embarrassing situations described above are nothing compared to those suffered by merchants, neighbors who are victims of drug trafficking, or people who were attacked, mistreated, or injured.
Should I consider myself lucky for that? Can’t even escape that guilt?
As if that were not enough, we are subjected to a media debate about insecurity that leaves aside the main explanation: poverty of 40%, growing marginality, vast sectors of the population that can no longer face the prices of a gondola, horrifying social fragmentation…
Meanwhile, the authorities continue to discuss how many police officers should be placed on those same streets that they have no longer traveled alone for a long time, either because whenever they do so they are usually accompanied by their official entourage, or because – even if they did – they are already They are not able to understand what people feel.
#daily #life #insecurity #distracted #loses