One rock, thrown

Thanksgiving eve, somebody threw a sizable rock through my almost new vehicle's rear window. Glass everywhere, some minor damage to the interior, and a $200 hit. Apparently the same good citizens similarly assaulted two other cars in the neighborhood.

The perps will never be caught, I'm sure, so I'm left to speculate about who they were, and why they did it. One supposes anger and alienation, a terminal lack of empathy, and a personal sense of powerlessness fleetingly assuaged by striking out at some perceived representative of the hated order.

The bottom line is that I feel violated. I felt the same way when somebody stole my bike from my basement, and when somebody stole my motorcycle years ago, and when somebody else smashed the window of an earlier vehicle to steal a tool box and sleeping bag. These are minor crimes, to be sure; none involved personal injury or even peronsal risk, and none posed insurmountable financial problems for me. But there was real injury nonetheless, the sense of violation, the feeling that part of my personal world had been violently entered and abused.

Such victimization perhaps gives me some insight into the nature of the crime of rape, insofar as someone who has never felt vulnerable to rapists may have such insight, as I'm given to understand the worst part for victims is not the physical injury, but the emotional one, the sense of violation of the most intimate and sacrosanct core of one's personal world, the violent assertion by the attacker that the victim lacks even the right to control her very body.

I suspect that in all such cases the criminal is motivated more by a desire to assert power than by any more "rational" desire for the material benefit of their crime ... and to assert that power over an anonymous other, a faceless part of the "them" seen as the criminal's oppressor, or over a known other who personifies in the criminal's mind the same supposedly nefarious "other."

It probably seems an enormous cognitive leap to jump from here to a commentary on the body politic, but I posit that there is a linkage between the failings of these small-time criminals and the cabal that has stolen our country. I used to believe -- I believe still, in fact -- that government exists to serve the common good and reflect the will of the people, and I've spent my entire career in public service for that reason. But the capitalists' and reactionaries' silent coup has terribly corrupted our polity, our government, our governmental process and our culture. Yes, base greed offers some explanation for their motivations, but I cannot help be feel that the inner demons driving the neocon era of reaction are closely related to the alienated rage of the mindless petty criminal.

Surely, a leadership which truly felt emotionally secure in their own selves and which felt true compassion and empathy with others would not devise the policies currently besetting our country, just as surely as a compassionate and emotionally secure individuals would never viciously attack nor attempt to subjugate others to their will.

Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 23 November 2007