Meditations on Thievery

While walking through the gates to exit the subway, two men spontaneously embraced me, joyfully crying “Hey, my friend! Heyyy!” in accented English while their comrades stood by. Following my first impulse, I pushed them away (actually quite roughly), but it was too late, and the MP3 player in my breast pocket was gone.

It wasn’t a really really expensive MP3 player. And it wasn’t my wallet or passport. And it’s not like I’m so hard up that I can’t buy another one if I really want it. But it was mine, and now it’s gone, taken by some men who called me “friend” and hugged me to distract me. Yuck.

This is the first time in a long time that anything has actually been stolen from me. (The last time I can remember was high school, when a ring of students was busted stealing $100 TI-83 calculators from other students and selling them on the internet. I was one of the victims.)

So we’re not living in the best neighborhood, and people steal things sometimes. But for some reason this is really hard for my protected Connecticut psychology to come to terms with. The feelings of violation and injustice have been described to me before, but now I’m feeling them first-hand. To distract myself from these unpleasant feelings, here is a picture that has nothing to do with these meditations: 


 Also, these guys were Arabic, and they live in a racist society that discriminates against people who come from their part of the world (or from northern Africa, the other region which sends many unwanted immigrants into France). Which complexifies things further. In all probability, economic injustices necessitate their lifestyle of straight-up banditry, and they would happily leave their life of sordid crime if they could find gainful employ. So on the one hand I’m sympathetic to the struggles of living within a racist society, and therefore (in some measure) willing to forgive their transgressions against me and the laws of this country. On the other hand, WHAT THEY DID IS REALLY MESSED UP, and on more than one level. After all, with every theft they execute, this group of people willfully participates in the systematic production of the very racial prejudices from which they are (presumably) trying to escape. In other words, I’m going to really be careful now whenever I see groups of people loitering around the subway entrances and exits: especially if they’re young, male, and Arabic. Also, it kind of looks like the gryphon is spitting on my head, right??

But with the help of my father’s example, I want this conclusion to take a different tone. He taught me from a very young age what may be the best and most therapeutic way of responding to this sort of thing. When I was a boy, some crook broke his back windshield and stole a leather jacket out of his car. Losing the jacket hardly bothered him at all: he explained to me that if someone else needed it badly enough to steal it, he would gladly give it up. On the other hand, having his window broken angered him substantially... because the car was unlocked the whole time. Tonight, I was mugged with a hug, and isn’t that better than having my metaphorical windshield broken? So today, I sign myself:

Windows Unbroken,
Chris