We don’t talk enough about America’s permanent ongoing saturation of “Stranger Danger” hysteria. It’s like this country’s whole social ecosystem teaches full grown adults to perceive an invisible army of rabid bogeymen lurking around every fucking corner. And it’s everywhere. Absolutely fucking everywhere, top to bottom, from true crime media and urban legends like the old Poison Halloween Candy thing to our sadistically rage-fueled, revenge-based justice system and immigration policies. The NRA and the war on drugs and post 9/11 airport security and mccarthyism and satanic panic and just E V E R Y T H I N G in America, everything that has defined its history for 100+ years is constantly nothing but this fucking FEAR TERROR FEAR TERROR for positively no reason. None.
Reasons I have found strangers in my yard at night (I’m not American):
Homeless woman, after a backyard party, starving and looking for any food we might’ve forgotten to take inside. We gave her some food.
Drunk man at wrong house. Not aggressive, just confused.
Lost guy trying to find the house of a family member he was supposed to be staying with. He was a few houses down.
Man with four tiny kittens who had escaped into my yard. He’d knocked on my door but I hadn’t heard him. Couldn’t leave the kittens in a stranger’s yard all night so he slipped through the side gate to look for them. I helped him and we found the kittens.
The idea of responding to strangers at your house with gunfire is bonkers.
there are corners of this website where the year is still 2013. and sometimes, on beautiful nights when the veil is thin, you can find them . if you know where to look
just be yourself and don’t care about what other people think! Why would you care about what other people think about you?
(DISCLAIMER: what other people think about you will determine every aspect of your support network, your ability to get housing and employment, the quality of your medical care, how you are treated by the legal system, and how likely people will be to sic the police on you for violating social norms.)
hey, listen, I get where you’re coming from but I don’t think this one is capitalism’s fault. I really don’t think capitalism is responsible for the general concept of social ostracism. We can’t just use capitalism to mean “bad thing-ism” we gotta remember that some words mean things
