No Times de hoje #122

There is something about New Yorkers... well, there's many things. The article on today's New York Times points at their illusive sense of safety. In a city of 8+ million (18+ in the urban area around it) people act as if they were in a small inoffensive town that has never witnessed small theft. Here are a few excerpts:

(...) most New Yorkers, myself included, love pretending we live in a very big small town. Thus, when I needed to leave my keys for a friend visiting for the week, I did what people in suburbs all over the country do: they hide little brass passports to all their worldly goods under car visors and garden gnomes. As I do not live within 20 blocks of a garden gnome, my keys went in the mailbox.

(...) Now when I see a man returning to his table to find his iPhone has vanished I think, well — what exactly did you expect? When did kindness become a norm instead of a perk? These are not tourists, mind you. These are people who ostensibly know better. These are the same people who assume they’d be a-O.K. in downtown Detroit at 3 a.m. simply because they’re from New York.

(...) Indeed, we’ve ventured so far out on the trust spectrum that it’s not simply a matter of assuming other people aren’t criminals, but assuming they’re an army of personal assistants. In the past year I have twice found someone’s phone in the back of a cab. The first time a woman asked me if I was still in the neighborhood and could drop it off at her apartment. The second time a man asked me if I could have a messenger bring it to him at his office the next morning because he was “super busy.”