Politically, my younger brother is somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney, if not actually Joseph Stalin. My brother regards liberals like me with frank contempt; I keep telling him that my heart really doesn’t bleed, it just sometimes aches a bit.
I was thinking of my brother’s worldview recently when I heard that there is a house in Coral Ridge that has had barbed wire installed along the top of its wooden fence. After three robberies last year, the owners are taking no more chances.
I feel their pain: Over the course of 15 years in Coral Ridge my partner and I have endured multiple break-ins, and what is bewildering is I don’t know why any respectable thief would target our house. It’s a smallish house on a dry lot, not one of those waterfront castles that look like an agnostic’s rendering of a Tudor mosque. Why us?
The first robbery was small: some garden tools were stolen from the carport, so we installed a shed. When the shed was robbed we added a padlock. After the padlock was cut we converted the carport to a garage.
After someone broke in through the garage window we fenced the backyard and got a watchdog. Lucy, our large, yellow Lab, refuses to bark at strangers although she wakes the dead when my partner or I enter the house. This “watchdog,” in return for a rawhide chew toy, was helpful enough to show the next set of thieves where my grandfather’s heirloom watch was kept.
After that, we installed an alarm system, put deadbolts on the gates and hung up a “Beware of Dog” sign (which pleased Lucy immensely.) We stopped short of installing video cameras and bars on the windows because by now we could not enter the house without three keys, two pin numbers and an iris scan. We felt secure.
I wasn’t thinking about security last Thursday morning. I was working from home, as I often do, when the doorbell rang; I was doing budgets, which I abhor, so I ignored it, as did Lucy. The window over my desk overlooks our side yard so I was startled a minute later to see two 20-something guys walk beneath my window. They tried to open the deadbolted gate to the backyard and when they couldn’t, they began to climb over it. I stood up, knowing they were not looking for a lost softball, and when they saw me looking at them through the window, they beat a retreat down the street.
This was a first. We had not been home for our other robberies and this was the first time I had come face to face with intruders, so it felt personal. Feeling I should do something, I called the police, who were there within minutes, and I emailed the Coral Ridge Association to alert the neighbors. The cop was friendly and professional, but his attitude was, “These things happen.”
The next day I got an email from the Association saying that 2 young men fitting the description I provided had been arrested in similar circumstances. Briefly, I wondered if they were good kids, perhaps unloved or victims of a bad economy. And then I decided I didn’t care: If anyone has to live behind bars I would rather it not be me.
Am I still a liberal? I agree that capital punishment would be an extreme response to this situation, but if waterboarding were legal I would happily run to get a bucket. And, as I would tell my conservative younger brother, my heart would not be bleeding at all. Maybe not even aching.