Weekend Engagement #265 | Hating the place where you live

Happy day to all, dear friends of the community, how are you today? I'm pretty good and I hope you are too. Yesterday I was looking at this week's the Weekend Engagement topics and two were very interesting to me: the first one a zombie apocalypse, but I didn't have pictures to represent it with, so I stuck with the second topic which I liked and took pictures of just yesterday. So, let's talk about yes, “have I ever looked around at the neighborhood I live in and felt like I hated it”.

The answer to this is short and simple. Yes, on more than one occasion I have had that feeling of hating the neighborhood I live in, the explanation is really the complex and needs some context. I start by saying that I live in a neighborhood in Venezuela, already a given for any other country. This can be a sign of danger, because yes, in Venezuela there are some neighborhoods considered the most dangerous in the world and more or less this is what my hatred is about where I live.

Since I was growing up in this place everything was pretty quiet, at least for the eyes of a child, but according to my age, I started to hear comments from other people when I mentioned where I lived, they said “that's very dangerous”, “they steal there”, “I don't even go there” and many other things, which made me start to pay more attention to the things that happened in my neighborhood.

I must say that these things were happening, if they robbed people who were walking along a main avenue near the entrance of the neighborhood, but do you know who did it? Kids from 17 to 20 years old at that time, who thought they were the greatest, that they were against the system or whatever nonsense they had in their mind. These actions made a lot of things difficult. The vast majority of cab services obviously didn't want to come into the neighborhood because they could be robbed. Many services stopped coming, which made several things difficult.

What bothered me the most about all this is that these kids I am talking about, who thought they were thugs, were cowards, when someone confronted them, whether it was someone who was really bad and did not play games like them, or even the police, they ended up crying, asking for help, that they wanted to kill them and many things like that, that is when the real problem of this came out, the relatives of these kids came out to defend them, saying that they did not do anything wrong.

I understand that the family often weighs, but you can not defend the indefensible, because these actions of wanting to free those who hurt the same neighborhood only ended up hurting us, at first they only stole from people who passed through the neighborhood, but then they ended up stealing from the same people they knew in the neighborhood, entering their homes when no one was there and taking the things they had there and there was no need to wonder who they had been.

For many years I never invited schoolmates to my house for obvious reasons, I could not count on the services of a cab if for some reason it was late and I wanted to get home, sometimes they accepted, but they left me farther away and I had no choice but to do it this way and walk the missing stretch on my own.

I understand that it is very easy to point fingers and say that because of a certain group things are like that, but here comes the interesting part: when a critical year arrived in Venezuela, many emigrated and among them, those alleged thugs and their families too, and what do you think happened? They never came back to steal around here, people started to feel calm, people were no longer worried about someone trying to break into their house to steal their belongings, all this was over, the problem is that, the fame of “dangerous barrios” was not.

Although many years have passed since then, there are still people who mention the name of my neighborhood and continue to say that it is dangerous, others emphasize that it used to be dangerous and it is complicated the truth. The fact that many children grew up with this mentality of wanting to be “the baddest”, damaged many and the fact that their parents did not pay attention to them also influenced them, so, although there was tranquility for several years, there will still be some with these pretensions of wanting to be the baddest and just being cowards.

I'm sorry if I extended a little, but I needed to explain the root of my hatred for my neighborhood, although I must clarify that my hatred is not so much to the geographical space it represents, but to the people who live there and the real cause of the name of the neighborhood is frowned upon, it is true that phrase “for one pays all”, because, although there are great people, those who are not, are the ones who make the most noise.

That's all for today, I hope it has been an interesting read for you. Thank you very much for taking the time to stop by, I hope to be a little more constant and continue participating every week. Happy weekend to all of you!