April 11, 2011
Fort Pickens, Florida
Then you have your rotten apples. Stone Mountain is a place where the principal gets robbed on the first day of school and a mom gets arrested for bringing her kid to help her go rob a bank. It’s where a woman gets raped in church and a four-year-old gets shot in the ass during a road-rage incident. Home-invasion robberies are unpleasantly common. People get robbed two years in a row. Burglars pistol-whip their victims then go free due to bureaucratic bungling. Sometimes the victims get gagged so tightly they suffocate. Other times they get murdered point-blank. A single gang is suspected in over 50 Stone Mountain burglaries.
When we called our landlord to tell him a house on our block was burglarized, he said his own home was recently ransacked. The whole operation took three minutes on a sunny day. The neighbors all watched, thinking that the efficient, uniform-wearing robbers were a moving crew.
One day about a week after Obama got elected, my wife was robbed under clear skies in a Decatur, GA, supermarket parking lot. Although she begged the gun-toting teenager to at least let her keep the baby’s medicine, he stole that, too, along with a few hundred dollars and her cell phone. When the robber reactivated her phone about a week later, we called the police detective and told him the case was solved”all he had to do was trace the phone. Instead, the detective acted annoyed and did nothing.
Forgive us for thinking that the cops don”t care about these sorts of things.
My father-in-law, who’s lived in Stone Mountain since the mid-1960s, says he thinks the Atlanta metro area will erupt into rioting over the next couple years, whether due to hyperinflation, unemployment, or a dried-up welfare teat. Though I”m not about to shift gears into full-on Kurt Saxon mode quite yet, the least I can do is make sure my fort is…fortified.
The Castle Doctrine reigns supreme in Georgia, meaning a man’s home is his castle”or, if you prefer, his fort”and that one is legally entitled to ruthlessly split open the melon of any ineducable ne”er-do-well who deliberately pries his way past all your locks and bolts and latches and chains. I”ve taken every imaginable step to make it as difficult as possible for them to cross over that line. But were they to poke one toe over it, they”d be met with a lightning bolt of epileptic Berserker violence from someone who”d take great joy in squashing them like the dung beetles they are.
So that’s why we build forts, kids”to make sure things never get to that level.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost. Better yet, good locks make good forts. The “community” ends at my front door. It’s where the rest of the world ends and my family’s private world starts.
One day I hope to pack up the kinfolk and head for higher ground”somewhere that you don”t have to lock any of your doors or windows much less quadruple-lock them. I know it’s daffy, zany, and full-blown red-hot snortin”-poppers nutso, but I hope one day to actually live somewhere that feels like a community.
But until we make that move, I”m keeping the house on lockdown. I”ll let the “open borders” types deal with all the party-crashers, intruders, and pistol-whippers. I”ll be busy with the power drill and screwdriver, tacking as many borders onto this house as it can handle.
