No Love For The Television Bandits

I called a friend and work colleague Monday because she is supposed to be helping me with some work stuff. While we were talking she told me that she wasn’t at work last Friday because she had an emergency. Someone broke into her family’s house when no one was home. Without missing a beat my reply was “Did they take your TV off the wall?” Her response was “Yeah, that’s all the bastards took.” They left a big hole in her wall after pulling it down. She’s not the first person it happened to. It happened to one of my neighbors and Sunday evening when I talked to head of the neighborhood organization she told me it happened five other times in our little section. Somehow these jokers have always seemed to break into a house when no one was home. They must case these houses for a long time. I guess they pick out the blocks where there is no activity during the day because everyone is at work or school.

Let me tell you about what those televisions mean to people in certain neighborhoods. All of these people have had to throw away all of their possessions once. Then they had to look at their house with nothing but the studs. Some people lived in trailers outside of their empty houses. Some of them paid to live in other places while their homes were rebuilt and hopefully their insurance company and the stupid Road Home program gave them enough money to fix it provided a crooked contractor didn’t steal it. After you go through all of that and finally get home, the first day you can come in from a long day and flip on that television is like the icing on the cake. It’s the period at the end of a long sentence spelling out everything you had to do to get back to your house. That’s got to cut deep when you go home and see that hole in your wall where the television used to be. I hope my address is not on the potential jacking list because I have people in my house during the day and the television is the least of my worries. If they just have to steal something I will leave the shade open and they can have my lawnmower.

I think I know how this is going to end. Some vigilante who knows a few people that have been victimized is going to stay home one day and meet these clowns at his back door with a big ass gun. Someone is going to get hurt really bad and people are going to wonder was someone’s life worth more than a flat screen television. It’s true that the life is worth more than the television but when you live in a city where people like to steal what you have worked hard to buy or replace you don’t always think rational. It’s bad enough we have a minimal feeling of security to begin with. That’s a damn shame when you deal with all this and can’t even watch the game Sunday on your big screen.

P.S……..

I hope whoever is buying these televisions installs one at their house and it catches fire destroying everything except the pets and anything belonging to the kids.