The video is one of many that are shown on television every day. A woman parks her car (somewhere in the suburbs. Accuracy is unnecessary because it can be anyone), and when she gets off is snatched by motochorros. The scene, repeated in the news, this time has something that attracts attention, which without noticing it in the foreground distinguishes it. What is different?
The sequence continues. The thief takes her car keys and handcuffs her purse. In the slight struggle his helmet falls off. The victim looks. The criminal walks unhurriedly towards the car he is about to steal and, before entering, bends down to look for the helmet. When he walks away, the woman turns on herself, opens the door of her house and enters.
In that final movement an atrocious and at the same time ordinary truth is revealed: the naturalness with which victim and perpetrator experience the moment. The thief looks so used and safe -What a paradox-, that in the flight takes the time to pick up his helmet. The woman assumes the theft with the resignation of the expected. That is why her next decision, after being stripped away, is to enter the house as if nothing had happened.
The scene synthesizes the painful extreme that we reach: having reached the point of accepting as normal a situation that should be absolutely infrequent. Surprising? In much of the suburbs, no one would dare to consider a robbery as an exceptional event. On the contrary, it is passed as a near possibility that “Sooner or later it can happen.” That conviction won over consciences and is assimilated with latent fear and shared discouragement, but also with the certainty of the almost inevitable.
According to a survey by Clarion, in 2020 there were 156 deaths in episodes of insecurity in the province of Buenos Aires (the statistics include criminals and police), of which 124 were due to shooting and robbery. Of the total, 45 involved motorcycle jets and starters, 24 were in house robberies and 37 in car thefts. Only one of the dead fell in a bank robbery.
Among the victims were retirees, bricklayers, merchants, teachers, delivery men, bakers and the unemployed. The numbers show and help to understand that the target of this daily violence is ordinary neighbors. Those who have no alternative, perhaps, but to get used to it.
If a violent death should be enough, 156 (almost one every two days) build the conviction that no one is safe. How to live with that reality? For most, taking refuge in the desperate consolation of the lesser evil: if not a few assaults are accompanied by extreme violence and murder, whoever emerges unscathed from a robbery experiences it as a lucky episode.
Transform the anguish into the grateful relief of being alive. It is nothing new and can be understood, but it is also the symptom of an extreme abnormality. What a privileged idea we were able to achieve.
The naturalization of violence and theft hides a double face that is also dramatic. Those who live with the possibility of being attacked can resort to extreme plot strategies: “I give everything” or “I grab an iron.”
Of the more than 150 dead last year, no less than 22 were criminals who fell from bullets fired by their victims. Because the other side of resignation is irrational and also deadly rebellion.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/our-maddening-naturalization-of-theft/
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