Paranoia Is a Rational Response to a World Gone Mad
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Can Mayor Eric Adams (R) bring down crime with a progressive DA Alvin Bragg?
Paranoia, in our time at least, is the better part of valor. Our time is a time of rampant crime: muggings, carjackings, smash-and-grab store lootings, and random murder. I have not been directly affected by any of this marauding, but hearing about it on television and radio news, receiving online flashes about it on my cellphone and stories from friends, I find myself affected by it, as I suspect most people are.
The other night at 7, I left to pick up dinner at a restaurant less than 100 yards from our apartment building. I walked warily on the deserted street over to the restaurant, and when I returned, using my fob to get back into our building, I heard myself exhale a sigh of relief. I live in Evanston, Ill., the first suburb north of Chicago, traditionally a peaceful place once known as the land of the blue-rinse dowager.
One of the radically different aspects of the current crime wave in America is its spread to previously safe, middle and upper-middle- and even upper-class neighborhoods and suburbs. Before now in Chicago, much of the crime was committed on the South and West sides and was so-called black-on-black crime. Hearing or reading about it, one felt a distant sympathy. But that sympathy has now been replaced by paranoia. “Even paranoids,” the poet Delmore Schwartz, himself a certified paranoic, said, “have enemies.”
Daily I am sent online something called Evanston Now, which includes a portion of what must be the town’s police blotter. In a not unusual sample of a few days ago, I discover that officers “investigated four calls of gunshots fired and three reports of catalytic converters stolen.” Added to this were the brief accounts of cash and jewelry taken from an unlocked 2015 Honda, a pry tool used to force entry into a nearby garage, a 2011 Chevrolet spray-painted, the front end of a 2020 Toyota smashed, various items stolen from an LA Fitness locker, a bag and its contents lifted from a park, and a wallet and its contents taken from a nearby home. Other days one learns of cars stolen a block or two from where I live.
A gas station where I occasionally stop for a car wash was recently the scene of a shooting in which five young people were wounded, one fatally. Another recent killing occurred near a hamburger stand I frequent. Then there is the pure vandalism: graffiti on churches and other buildings, slashing of tires, busting of windshields and store windows. What makes so much of this crime especially scarifying is its passionless impersonality. Those who engage in it often seem to do so casually, as if they had nothing better to do.
Whenever I get into my car now, I lock its doors instantly, taking no time to check my cellphone or turn on the radio. At stoplights, I leave a car’s length space between my car and the car in front of me, so that before carjackers attempt to wrestle me out I have room to turn and drive away. A friend has a different solution: buy a gun and shoot any carjackers before they get to him.
Two nights ago I drove to a nearby Chinese restaurant to pick up a takeout order. No parking spaces available, I had to park illegally. Should I leave my hazard lights on? If I do, it occurred to me, wouldn’t I be signaling potential carjackers of my imminent return, and thus making a target of myself? Better to risk a parking ticket than make oneself potentially prey to violence.
What is to be done about all this noxious crime? Some claim the recent increase in crime is owed to the Covid pandemic. Others say there are too many guns on the streets. Others claim that the want of jobs leaves those who commit these crimes no choice. And some aver that crime isn’t the problem at all, but the need for police reform is.
But I wonder if the problem isn’t cultural. I refer to an American culture all too ready to assign victimhood status, too ready to overlook even violent behavior, a culture in which progressive prosecutors claim that punishment of criminals doesn’t work. The pervasive crime with which we now live, and for which no persuasive solutions are forthcoming, shows a society becoming unhinged. Something has to be done. But what? On the acuity of the answer rests the safety, and thereby the sanity, of the nation.
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