Camaraderie, Stabbings

Good: On Friday, a group of UC to the SC history grads pulled off an entirely successful social outing. We had a bunch of the first-year cohort all the way up to my homies who've been in the program since 2003. We hit the Red, we hit the Poet + Patriot, and then we hit A's apartment for cookies, Wii, conversation, and more beer-drinking. The group was huge by our modest standards; unlike the half-dozen of past years, we had close to 20 at the evening's height.

Bad: While we were at A's, with the cookies and the Wii and the drinking, some poor 16-year old kid got stabbed to death by gang members about a block away. My hazy recollections of the post-1opm time period include several of my colleagues noting "there's some kind of big deal with cops over there" and me thinking "meh."

This brings to four, by my count, the number of people stabbed within three blocks of my apartment in the last month or so. I'm still trying to crack the code on SC as dangerous and sleazy, and my current hypothesis is sort of depressing: I think of SC as dangerous because it's less polarized / class-segregated than anywhere I've yet lived. It's so compact and so expensive that everyone lives cheek-by-jowl, from working families to retired people to grad students to, say, pit-bull owning, knife-wielding actual gang members. We're all stuck together. In the past, in Portland or Eugene, there was crime and violence, but it tended to be spread out and to happen largely in neighborhoods that I didn't live in.* I feel threatened in SC all the time because, A., actual horrible shit does indeed happen here regularly, and B., because I can't pretend that I'm not potentially in the line of fire.

In conclusion: thanks to the history kids for coming out. Also, we're intent on moving away within nine or ten months.

* Or at least I felt like it was happening in other neighborhoods, which isn't really true. This is a question of perception more so than fact.