Helplessness as a lifestyle choice

Yesterday's ride home with NPR on the radio was another of those moments of intellectual cacophony that made me so incredulous that I wanted to shout back at the radio. I'm not kidding, I just could not believe what I was hearing.

For one 89-year-old man, a lifetime of collecting baseball cards delivered a solid return this past weekend: $1.5 million dollars and counting. Lionel Carter of Evanston, Ill., sold a portion of his 50,000-card collection at auction.

Among the lots: the 1951 rookie card for Mickey Mantle.
"I would still rather have the cards than money," Carter told NPR's Robert Siegel.

Here's the story, in a nutshell. You'll have to click the link to get to the source and to hear the actual report.

Lionel is selling his beloved, exquisite baseball card collection that he lovingly accumulated over 5 decades. Why? Because he was the victim of a home invasion burglary… One afternoon an unknown man came to his front door with an obviously made up story about an accident in his back yard and in spite of Lionel's efforts, the man forced his way inside the home and took Lionel out the back way. While Lionel endeavored to remove the man from his property, another person entered from the front and stole $250,000 worth of Lionel's baseball card collection.

Here's the first problem: the police acting on a suspicion from previous bad behavior, apprehended a bad guy in possesion of Lionel's cards. And the "Only Ones" types told Lionel that he could either press charges and wait for his cards while they were held as evidence, or- he could drop the charges against the known bad guy and get his cards returned to him. The gent chose to have his cards returned and to let a home invading burgler go free. At this point, Mr. Carter decided that his card collection intact was more important than taking a criminal and putting him behind bars. In my humble opinion, the cops/prosecuters let Mr. Carter down by not finding a way to jail this choirboy without needing to maintain his cards as evidence. Certainly one might expect that there was evidence of additional criminal activity that could have been used to jail this home invader.

But now Mr. Carter has a much bigger problem- two problems really. First, he knows that the bad guys know that he is an easy target and a pushover when it comes to criminal prosecution. He knows that the criminal element sharks, circling around his home and neighborhood have smelled blood in the water. Second, he knows that he is helpless to prevent further attacks on his home and person and baseball card collection.

He never discusses adding security to his home to protect his prized belongings or family during the interview. He doesn't mention a whole house alarm system or a reinforced, fireproof and vault secured door on his room where the collection was maintained, he just gives up. He gives in and admits that he is powerless to defend himself, his family and his baseball cards. He puts them up for auction.
What Mr. Carter doesn't ever mention is that through his choice to be powerless, he can't provide protection for anyone else in his home or himself. Somehow he believes that removing the attractive nuisance will relieve the interest in his home that the bad guys have already shown. He has has parted with his most prized possesion in the misguided hope that he might now live in peace from evil. He admits he couldn't protect the cards and so abandons them but fails to see how the same reasoning means that he should abandon his wife or other family since he can't protect them either in the face of a very real threat.

Maybe Lionel Carter doesn't have to choose to be armed to protect his home and family and possesions. Perhaps there were other security methods that could have been implemented, as I mentioned before; reinforced storage for the card collection and/or a monitored home alarm system with panic buttons on his keychain that might have been implemented. But now the collection is gone, and I'm certain Mr. Carter's pain at the loss of his collection is not as bad as the pain of his helplessness.

It just didn't have to be that way.

Sadly, my spousal unit is in complete harmony with Mr. Carter's choice and she sufers the same disconnect between responisbililty and personal protection and reliance. Her way would be to give in and let the thugs and criminals take what they wanted, even to the cost of physical harm, in hopes that the threat would be satisfied and go away to allow her cower in her corner. This is so unacceptable to me and it makes me cranky!