“You Can’t Get Away from It”

Holeee mackerel! This episode occurred in the early afternoon, right where I almost bought a nifty condo to get away from the unending crime and bum drama here in the ‘Hood. It’s within walking distance of where I was going to buy.

At the time of the Great Garage Invasion, I remarked to one of the cops that I thought maybe I should move out of this area to escape the endless crime episodes — to Scottsdale, Fountain Hills, or Sun City, for example.

“Don’t do that!” said he. “It’s everywhere: you can’t get away from it.”

Appears that he was right: this sh!t really is everywhere. About your best bet to avoid being beaned when you go out in the backyard is to buy into a gated community. But even then…you have to leave its sacred precincts to go to the grocery store or the doctor or the vet.

{chortle!}

Imagine a gated community where just about everything the residents need on a routine basis is INSIDE the gates. Like Sun City or Fountain Hills or SmallTownUSA with a big wall around it and a gate that opens with a code, attended by a security guard.

Around here we do have a lot of gated developments, but they’re relatively small and, other than a one-room community center and swimming pool, they have no other amenities.

Now suppose that in addition to the community center and the pool, the place also had a general store — selling groceries and drugstore items. And a pharmacy, where you could get prescriptions filled. And a clinic, where you could visit a nurse practitioner or a doctor and a dentist for your various minor ailments. And a veterinarian, maybe.

Add a K-8 school. Or maybe, depending on the size of the place, K-12 schools.

Think o’that. You would hardly ever have to leave your immediate precincts. You might not even need to own a car. For the few errands that would take you out of the place, you could use Uber or Lyft. Because the development would in effect be its own privately owned municipality, the HOA could block “entrepreneurs” like Tony the Romanian Landlord from buying houses there and turning them into reform schools for juvenile delinquents. Or into rentals. High enough walls around the perimeter would limit the number of cop-chase dramas…by a big margin.

O’course…America would cease to be America. Every neighborhood would become its own municipality. Cities would become agglomerations of tiny mini-governments, rendering city governments largely irrelevant. Same might apply to county and state governments. And upward mobility? Whazzat?

On the other hand, we wouldn’t be dodging crooks and cop helicopters every time we venture out of the house….