Endangered

So, I haven’t slept all night.  And in my flick through of news,  I see that some guy named Sam “The Punisher” Abdul Rahim aka Melbourne’s most marked man (so the news has taken pains to tell us) has been shot dead in a carpark in Preston in front of his girlfriend.  And they’re acting like it’s some kind of tragedy.

Do I care about this specimen that chose to live his life being a low life thug?  No.  Do I care he was gunned down in front of his girlfriend?  As far as I’m concerned, she knew his lifestyle and his criminal conduct which ensured others of his kind marked him for death.  She chose to stay and be part of his life.  Choices come with consequences.  

What doe concern me is that this happened barely a 10-minute drive from my front door; and that’s a nice, sedate, 50kph 10-minute drive.  Go to Google maps for Melbourne and search Quest Apartments Preston, then scroll a bit north to find Edwardes Lake.  That’s how far we are apart.

I wonder how many times I stood next to this man at the supermarket, or in sat near him in the food court at Northland while I enjoyed an iced donut with a cup of coffee.  When did my local neighborhood become a slum of underworld thugs?

When I grew up, this sort of thing happened elsewhere.  Far off elsewhere.  It wasn’t right around the corner.  We were safe.

I could (and did – daily) go off on my bike by myself for hours on end, riding all over the neighbourhood on both sides of Canterbury Road despite the expressed limit of my freedom was 5 houses in either direction, according to my mother.  However, nobody ever took me to task over my lengthy outings and absence in the street where there was nowhere to hide.

Nobody ever offered me sweets or stalked me in a car.  Nobody ever tried to strike up conversation unless they were worried about a me for some reason or they were doing their garden and I’d stopped by because their garden was pretty.  I was safe, and I absolutely felt it.

Had I fallen or hurt myself, I felt secure going to any door and asking for help..  I never felt dark clouds of threat hanging over me.  I would have received help from anyone I went to, and they would have called my parents to come and get me had I needed it and cared for me until they arrived.  I had no need to be scared.  The world I saw was a safe place and I was safe within it.

Of course, we knew about stranger danger.  We knew about the Neighborhood Watch program and how to identify houses where sanctuary could be found by their Neighbourhood Watch badge on the letterbox (or someone else just as visible) which pointed an unmistakable path to sanctuaries which would always take in a kid who needed help no matter the day, time or reason.   

Now, here I am, decades later and far more infirm than I ever was back then, and those days of safe havens seem very far away and utterly lost to me.

I only WISH places like that were still available to me when I feel unstable on my feet, or overly breathless and in need of a chance to sit down and drink some water, or even just because I’m feeling uncertain and certainly unsafe about the people around me.  I know that in my current condition, I’m a prime target for thugs of any age who are on the prowl looking for a target to amuse themselves with.

The sad truth is that even in my own doors, I’m not safe no matter how much I try convince myself that I am.  I don’t know if there’s anywhere on the planet that could genuinely be labelled “safe”.  Not in this day and age.

A few years ago, a woman was gunned down right up the road from my home. In fact, I could have walked there in just minutes it was that close.  Literally, streets away.

More recently, I was here enjoying a coffee and watching a show on the tele when there was a massive boom and my entire house shook.  A car had ignited in the next street.  Only a single row of houses separated that street from me.  It turns out the car was stolen and dumped there before being set alight. 

And what about that guy who was in a car running from police and which drove into our car pen.  They mowed down two fences, managed to do a U-turn to evade the cops and some took off running.  One hid under the tree outside my bedroom window.  It was around 2am.

I spoke to him, asking who he was, and that got the attention of the police who were examine the damage and discussing the matter.  When they pulled him out from under to tree to question him and pat him down, he had THREE knives son him.  That took place on the other side of the driveway directly across from me.

They let him go after taking his details but he came back a few days later.  Under the cover of dark, he smashed one of my living room windows, utterly destroying it.  Of course, I had been up, it was mid-evening.  By the time I could have gotten to the front door, he would have been long gone, so there was no point trying.  It was clearly payback for my having exposed his presence to the cops that night.  And it’s not the first time we’ve had a police chase end in our car pen. 

Then there’s the couple that lived on the other side of the fence to the next street who were selling drugs and we had their clientele coming and going at literally all hours of the day and night. 

And what about that woman who lives literally right around the comer (a 2-minute walk away) who likes to play up her “mental disability” so she doesn’t have to work and can play on her phone all day.  She’s nowhere near as ‘disabled’ as she likes to make out, but if she keeps the act up, she never has to work, can get away with most things, and gets free money from the Government to fund her grossly lazy lifestyle.

One of her favourite pastimes is to discuss sex around the local kids and does so with wanton abandon.  She has no adult friends (unless you count the men who come by) so she seeks out the children, even venturing into their back yards to engage with them regardless that it’s trespassing. 

Her sex talk is explicit and her sole topic of conversation.  She doesn’t care how inappropriate it is and she doesn’t care if their parents find out  She will rave on about her many  boyfriends telling anyone who will listen how long their dicks are and what they do with them.  If the kids try to move away, she follows them to continue.  All of them are under 13 and the youngest is 5. 

She also has men in the neighbourhood who drive around this street specifically hoping to run into her.  She calls them her boyfriends.  I beg to differ.  A boyfriend doesn’t mine being seen in public with you and will take you out places to share time with you and I proud to have you on his arm.  In this case, she gives them sex any time they snap their fingers.  If that means having sex in the back of a car while the neighbourhood kids ae barely 4 feet away, so be it.

If I thought I could be anywhere safer, I’d move.  I don’t think any such place exists though.  I’m no safer here than I would be if I moved to another suburb.  The rot has sunk in all over.  The days of safe areas are long gone.

We never used to be a violent city.  Now, when I most need to feel safe, and am a prime target to this scum, there is no place to run.  I don’t know the words to convey how distressing that is. 

If you want to file a police report, you’d better be sure the scum don’t know your name or where you live because they can and will come back to make you pay for ever daring to open your mouth.  See my window for proof of that.  That puts all the power squarely with the scum and makes helpless victims of those who do the right thing.

While we don’t have the crime level of the USA, what we do have is horrific.  I don’t know how Americans ever manage to stay sane.  What we do have is bad enough.

What about the guy who held up the Lindt Café in Sydney and took anyone in there as hostage?  

Or the creep who had been released on bail and drove his car though the Bourke Street Mall gleefully mowing down pedestrians left and right?

For the most part, they come armed with machetes and knives instead of guns and feel like superheroes when they prey upon the innocent. 

I don’t know what kind of world we live in, but what seems abundantly clear is that there is no sanctuary, no way to stop them and absolutely everywhere. 

The biggest question is, when did this world become so sick and twisted that we have increasingly lost our ability to be truly shocked by it anymore. 

We have a banquet of vile events endlessly fed to us via the tv, on the internet, in video games, and the news reports.  Then, suddenly, it’s no longer at arm’s length or happening to someone else far away.  It’s on your doorstep and there is no place to hide. 

It’s a view of the world I am learning to despise and find myself with no choice to embrace.  To put on rose coloured glasses and ignore what is unfolding around me is sheer suicide. 

I just can’t help finding this world view to be depressing, vile and utterly anxiety inducing.  Where are the bolt holes when you need them?  How I long for the golden days that I never appreciated enough while I lived them? 

There’s a statistic somewhere that says that in our whole history, we have only been free of major conflict for just 288 days.  They stress major conflict.  In my humble opinion, who needs major conflict when the violence has come home and is around us every second of every day? 

Maybe we should hang out a warning to any alien visitor.  Earth: No place to hide.  No way to avoid it.  No end in sight.  Visit at your own risk.

Just how did we become such a vile species?