Our Own Private Kristallnacht, or a Harbinger of Things to Come?

How to explain burglary to your teen

News of the break-in came two days after setting off on a road trip from LA to Colorado to visit my older daughter for her 21st birthday. Immersed in our audio book, The Breadwinner — summer required reading for our younger daughter— the call came while we were driving on a windy road near the continental divide. The book paused automatically as a woman’s hysterical voice came through our car speakers. It was our housekeeper, whom we had asked to check on the house a few days a week in our absence.

The connection was tenuous; we only caught words and phrases: Ladder to your bedroom … Broken glass everywhere… Ransacked… Went around the security cameras… Knew the house… Stole the entire safe…

My own phone vibrated. Two photos came through: one of the now-shattered, picture window to our bedroom; the other of our decimated bedroom closet. Glass was, indeed, everywhere — huge, jagged chunks; small, jewel-like ovals and everything in between that a camera could pick up in a hurried photo, which turns out to be quite a lot.

“Have you called the police?” I asked our housekeeper, but it was too late. We had entered a dead-zone on the highway.

Once we accepted that we weren’t going to reestablish contact any time soon, we began to talk.

“I guess we were robbed,” I said, stating the obvious because I couldn’t state anything else just yet. All of my valuables were in that safe. It wasn’t attached to the wall. We were waiting for a closet renovation to do that; a renovation planned for the fall. I felt immediately devastated and completely culpable.

More composed than me, our thirteen-year-old asked, “Why do you think it happened?”

The perpetrators obviously knew the exact position and layout of our room, not to mention the exact location of our safe, way up high on a shelf in our closet, reachable only by ladder, removable only by two people. It was someone we knew, even if only as a home owner might know a one-time-only worker like the filter cleaner on the air conditioner, or a plumber who fixes a broken drain, once. Or else it was someone closer to us; someone who was intimate with our security system. Someone who knew we weren’t all that secure, after all; someone who knew we were careless because we had a false sense of security way on top of the mountain where we live.

I had a quick flashback.

When our family moved to Los Angeles from NYC in 2019, we were in the middle of deep, quarantine, Covid, Trump era. We kept our distance from our neighbors and pulled our masks up snug around our faces feeling safer that way, not only from infection, but from the stressful political currents zapping around us.

Despite our best efforts to stay to ourselves, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, my then twelve-year-old and I got caught in a MAGA rally one day while taking our daily walk on a tree-lined pathway along Santa Monica boulevard in Beverly Hills. Fighting through a sudden throng of ralliers, many unmasked, we made our way back to our car and climbed the long, steep hill back up to our house.

Half an hour had passed since we got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but our hearts were still pounding, both of us in a prolonged state of shock from the clamor of honking horns, menacing shouts, the sheer quantity of pick-up trucks and American flags waving at the ends of scary-looking rods.

“That’s why we chose this place,” my husband reminded us as we settled down on our terrace. He waved his hand at the expanse around the bluestone — the Eucalyptus where the hawk rests; the other where the owl hoots; the mountains beyond in all their purple-hued majesty. “We’re safe up here,” my husband reiterated. “No one is going to come this far up the hill looking for trouble.”

How soundly we slept in our far-from-the-madding-crowd beds!

Flashback completed with the kind of clarity we always have in hindsight, I didn’t want to admit our stupidity and naivety to our daughter, so, I simply said, “We’re living in uneasy times.”

My husband joined in with a brief overview of income inequality and class tension.

“But why us?” our daughter persisted. “Why not the neighbors?”

“Why not us?” I tried. Then I realized I had something much better to draw upon. The Breadwinner is about a ten-year-old girl in Afghanistan who survives the brutality of the Taliban. The narrative centers around two important themes: how quickly life can change; and how resilient people can be, even in the face of the most crushing brutality.

“Think of The Breadwinner,” I pointed out to our daughter. “The protagonist had plenty of reasons to feel like life was against her, but she had an amazing survival-spirit and overcame all kinds of odds. Compared to what she and her family endured, our burglary is nothing. We just lost things. That girl and her family lost people; body parts; their freedom.”

“The ability to listen to, or play music!” my daughter added, getting into the spirit of things.

“We experienced a violation to be sure, but we have plenty of options, which is lucky!” I fist-pumped the air. “And no one was injured. That’s really what matters.”

“That doesn’t answer why we were robbed, though,” our daughter said soberly.

“Well,” I began uneasily. “I guess someone who knows us a little bit felt like life is unfair. In that person’s eyes, we have things to spare that they felt they needed. We weren’t around, and maybe our neighbors were, so they helped themselves to our things.”

“But why?” she pressed.

Goddamn it. I had no choice. I had to say it.

“Because mommy and daddy were stupid. And because not everyone is nice.”

I could hear our daughter’s gears turning. My husband and I place great emphasis on our daughter reciprocating behavior. She has to be taught this because she’s on the autism spectrum and doesn’t understand everything about behavior inherently, the way other, more neurotypical kids might. If she wants people to be nice to her, we’ve said time and again, she needs to be nice to them. As for being smart, how many times have we told her that being a science savant means nothing if she can’t apply her intelligence to real-world situations?

While our daughter took the time to process my statement (and, no doubt, figure out how to use it to her advantage in the future), I realized that we were insured for everything that was in the safe. There was some comfort in this thought, but you can’t replace your great-aunt’s strand of pearls or the one-of-a-kind vintage ring you bought yourself when you sold your first novel or the pin your parents gave you for your fiftieth birthday.

In the lull of my private recollections, our daughter asked, “Is it because I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community? Is that why us and not the neighbors?”

“God, no!” my husband and I said in passionate unison.

“How would anyone even know that outside our tiny little circle?” I reminded her.

“Is it because the next civil war has started?” she persisted. “Is that why?”

We’d been discussing civil war in regard to The Breadwinner, wondering if we are currently living in pre-Taliban/ pre-Second Civil War America. Is it time to leave, we’ve been wondering aloud as a family, or remain, like the family in The Breadwinner, patriots in the land we love, until either the end of our own lives or the end of oppressive rule?

Neither my husband nor I leapt to say “no” to our daughter’s question about civil war. Though our break-in could have happened at any time, it didn’t.

It happened at a time in America when Elon Musk has built his own space ship with some of the spare change he isn’t using to either buy, or not buy, Twitter, while our gardener, who’s day starts at 4:30 am, is also working as a night-time security guard but still can’t afford to live anywhere even near Los Angeles proper.

It happened at a time when when main-stream media, and the educated — including scientists — are being demonized, including liberal, white homeowners like (hum de dum) us.

It happened while the January 6th hearings are proving, without a doubt, that the Trump government was full of corruption, bullying, and lawlessness without any consequence for bad behavior and half our nation doesn’t care AT ALL; in fact, baby-Trumps are obtaining positions of power and influence in communities all across this country from the smallest county seat all the way up to the Supreme Court.

It happened at a time when America seems to have become irreparably unmoored from its democratic roots; at a time when neighbor seems more pitted than ever against neighbor.

From that point of view, it’s tempting to imagine our robbery as somehow connected to a civil war that may have begun on January 6th, 2021, if not earlier.

Then again, burglaries are not new business. They’ve been around since the dawn of time. My family was robbed at gunpoint in our apartment in NYC during the 1980’s at the height of the crack epidemic. We hadn’t locked the front door. The robber had walked right in.

“If you’re dumb enough to leave yourself vulnerable to thieves, you deserve to be robbed,” my great-uncle had said. He grew up on the lower east side and knew a thing or two that would have been better passed down to me than his wife’s now-stolen pearls.

Would that same great-uncle tell us that our burglary was a mere result of our stupidity, or, having known many people lost during the Holocaust, warn us that the event was a warning; the little violation that happens right before the big one? The one in which we, and others like us — meaning, people who have what others want — are killed? (See Wikipedia entries for Russian Revolution; French Revolution; Cultural Revolution).

Was the break-in our break-in for a new world order in which we need to live in a fortress-like setting simply to ensure our day-to-day survival?

Is it time to arm ourselves? To leave the country for a safer place (like—where?)? Or can we decide that this was just our daughter’s turn to learn that not everyone is wishing us well and chalk it up to our poor security arrangement?

As I wrestled through each potential question and answer, my daughter asked how we would know if a civil war had started.

Former teacher that he was, my husband jumped in with another question. “What do you think civil war might look like today?” he asked her.

“Like break ins?” our daughter suggested.

“Nah,” my husband said. “That’s just lawlessness and desperation. We don’t know who the robbers vote for or even if they can vote.” His eyes glued to the curves on the road, he nevertheless explained himself in straight tones. “We’re living in a perfect storm. The progressive left has promoted soft-on-crime policies, while the hard right is embracing a “no-consequences-for-bad-behavior” worldview. Add to this a sputtering economy, inflation, and a whole lot of people who are bummed out about going back to the workplace after getting paid to stay home for more than a year — “

“So, no civil war?” our daughter asked.

“No civil war,” I said. “And I’m sure everything can be fixed easily.” This I added more emphatically. “We’ll fix the broken window, get a new safe that’s built into the wall. Honestly, having fewer things of value around the house is better in general. Less to worry about it. It was a break-in this time but it could be a fire or an earthquake next time. Living in LA, we need to learn to handle adversity.”

Despite my own fear and anxiety, I tried to sound cheerful. A mother’s job, I decided, is to reassure. Not blindly, but within reason, especially in the case of doubt.

The very next moment, The Breadwinners came back over our speakers and we began to descend into a better-connected zone. Part of me wished we could turn back around and stay safely in the out-of-contact range, but if this robbery will teach me anything, it’s that there isn’t any out-of-range any more. We are all susceptible to peoples’ basest instincts, no matter where we are, no matter where we go. The best we can do is teach our children that bad people exist, urge our children to lock their doors better than we locked our own, and encourage them to stay ever-aware of those who might not be rooting for you, even as you continue to root for them.

August 2022