Revelations After a Robbery

I realize with a new car and about a million electronic devices I am a target for robbery. I realize how dumb it was for me to leave my GPS system and my phone and my purse in the car while I went into a client’s office today for work. I also realize it was the Bronx I was parked in, and here’s no telling what you will get when it comes to degenerates. There was some white kid maybe nineteen years old who was idling in his run-down gray car in front of a fire hydrant behind me who appeared to be checking out my butt, but was probably checking out my electronics.

But, in my defense, it was 1:30pm (broad daylight), in a really nice neighborhood on a main street with cops driving around everywhere, and I was only going to be in the client’s office maybe ten minutes to leave samples of my product and make a quick 30 second sales pitch.  And, c’mon, why wouldn’t he have been checking me out?  My butt looked GREAT! 

Nonetheless, I came out and my window had been smashed in, my navigation system stolen, and my cell phone gone.  At least the thief didn’t see my purse wedged under the seat. 

I was livid about the theft and the time it’s going to take to get the numbers in my phone back.  It didn’t help my mood that my company’s insurance doesn’t reimburse for personal property, so I have to shell out money to buy a new phone, as well as having to buy a new navigation system before I can work again (because my sense of direction rivals a dead person).

But, even in all this aggravation, I was struck yet again by the stupidness of racism. Here I am in the Bronx in a nice neighborhood robbed by a white guy not even old enough to vote. Two Puerto Rican cops pulled up and filled out my police report, and couldn’t have been nicer, more sensitive to my problem, or more accomodating in helping me, letting me sit in their car out of the cold while I gave them the necessary information. Right after getting my new phone, my close friend Zach who happens to be a 37 year old black man (and a computer genius), called to see if I wanted to go to lunch and wound up helping me log my phone numbers on a website he found so I never again have to worry about contacts being lost for eternity with a stolen phone.  And earlier the same day, a man from El Salvador who spoke literally no English, spoke to me about how he had turned his life around from the sadness of the criminals in his country murdering his eighteen year old daughter. I have never seen such strength.

Since moving to NY I have been struck by the amount of generalizations made by people I know about race and how people of a certain race “always do ____.” I am never able to desensitize myself to it because it is so utterly ignorant. It upsets me. I wasn’t raised to judge people on ethnicity or race. 

So, the next time you go to make some sort of assumption based upon what someone may seem from the outside, please remember this story. Trash can come in all colors, in all ages, in all sizes, and so can good people.  Race is not a determining factor. In honor of the imminent holiday, I want to remind you of good will toward men. All men.

Except for the idiot who robbed me.  He deserves a butt-kicking.