Things Which Have Not Changed (1)

Crime.

When I first told people I was moving back to Albuquerque, some of the friends I still had in the city warned me. “It’s not like when we were kids here,” they told me. “Violent crime is way out of control. It’s like that TV show, Breaking Bad, but real life.”

I'm not sure about that. Of course, it might be true that there's more crime here now than then. The city is certainly larger than it was, which means there are more people, which means in turn that (if only because of simple math) there will also be more criminals. And, too, there is a very real drug problem here—some very major drug cartels, very dangerous organizations, exist right across the border in Mexico. Plus, there are gangs here, and ethnic conflicts.

Still, the perception of crime is a personal and a very relative thing. In my own case, and from my own perspective, the city seems pretty much unchanged when it comes to threat level. If anything, I feel safer here now then I did before.

Of course, that is partly due to a lot of unique factors. I don’t normally go into those places where I’m likely to get mugged. And I am no longer a young man, and young men are surprisingly often the targets of violence, at least when the perpetrators are other young men.

Plus I am no longer in the local school system, which, in the 1960s and 1970s was not a happy place to be. Not if you were, shall we say, a member of a target population.

*

Yet, I'm interested in how often I hear from the residents that the City is worse than it was. I hear it from my friends here, both new and old, and from long term residents. You hear about the new and more violent gangs that are on the streets. They say we now have branch offices of the Cripes and the Bloods. And the Cartels really are here. Plus, of course, we have our local groups, local warlords, and everyone cites Breaking Bad.

But, the thing is, if you look at the actual crime statistics, you find rather a different story. At least as I interpret the numbers (and I’m using here the city’s own reports from cabq.gov/onlinesvcs/crimestats/), it looks to me as though the over-all rate of crime has actually gone down. Not way down. It's still all too possible to get mugged or hurt here. And we’re still far ahead (alas) of the rest of the nation…particularly in personal assault cases…but, things do seem to be moving in the right direction (i.e., downwards) even if the velocity could be better.

How then to account for the perception that Things Are Getting Worse? Why are so many people, particularly people I knew as a boy, telling me to watch my step?

I suspect the answer has to do more with the human soul than with the city's numbers. There is in us, I think, a hard-wired need to see the past as more fortunate than the present. I think we are designed, neurologically, to do so. I think nostalgia is a need as intense as hunger and desire, and arises from the same dark, damp, inexplicable recesses of the brain and the spine.

*

Why? Why would we have such a need? What would be its "evolutionary value?"

I suspect that it helps our daily lives. The past, made rosy, prepares us for the future. We strip away the realities of our genuine story…the pains, the embarrassments, the humiliations, the moment we realized our parents were human, the moment we realized that we ourselves were so very, very flawed…and what we have left is a fortress. The Past is then our refuge. Our goal.

Yes, we say, our present is less than lovely…but the past! Ah, the Past! The Past was perfect. It was where our parents loved us, our friends were genuine friends, our teachers offered us genuine wisdom, our wants were few and easily satisfied, and the future was ours to possess.

If none of these is now true, well, we have the memory that they once were. We can retreat into remembrance. Or, if we have energy, then we can set out to rebuild that vanished Eden. We can tell ourselves that we are not undertaking so daunting a task as the creation of something new. We are simply regaining what had been lost.

How easy it will be. Or so we tell ourselves.

And underestimating the length and difficulty of the job is a fundamental prerequisite to our beginning it.

*

So on some level it is healthy and good that my friends warn me of the degraded state of the world. Whether the world is degraded or not is irrelevant. It means that they are in touch with an ancient part of us that stands, amazed and frightened, at the gates of paradise. Stands, and plans, and strives for a way back in.

Which, alas, confronts me with an unsettling question. To wit, why do I not share their feelings? Why have I no touch of the shared and common Eden?



*


I suspect there are many reasons. For one, I was among that group of young people who, in the late 60s and early 70s, were so supremely focused on the future (moon shots and space travel, sci-fi and Star Trek, the fascinations of we pre-nerds at the dawning of the information age) that we never had much time to consider the Present, much less the Past.

And, too, I must confess to having a somewhat melancholic disposition. Some unfortunate aspect of my genetics makes me tend to remember only the less happy aspects of my history, the times when I've failed others or myself. (Alas, there is no shortage of those.)

But, most of all, I think, I suffer from excessive rationality. It is a kind of mental disorder, and one compounded by a regrettable knowledge of history, and particularly of its less attractive aspects.

*

As I say, these characteristics are not good. They are flaws in my makeup, not advantages.

But, one plays the hand one is dealt. I will work with not against my disability. If I cannot love the Past…or, at least, not my own Past in this city… I shall focus instead on the Present.

In other words, I shall pretend that Now is Memory. That the current is nostalgia.

Is it a perfect strategy? No. But, it is the one I shall employ. And, besides, there is a certain resonance about it. After all, I am told that this is the day of Breaking Bad.

But to break bad…to shatter evil…does not that also mean that one creates good?