Talk Story
THE FIRST TIME I visited my wife's tiny hometown in central Nebraska I needed a haircut. After breakfast on our first morning at the farm, I drove our rental car into town and parked on Minor Avenue, the main drag that runs six blocks from the co-op grain elevator all the way across town to the nursing home. Don’t blame hike in crime
on the faltering economyThere are four tree-lined blocks of comfortable old homes and two blocks of business district. There's a gas station/convenience store, city hall, senior center, café, tavern, insurance office, grocery, farm implement dealer and my destination, Gary's Barbershop and Sporting Goods.
When I pulled up in front of Gary's, a gigantic tractor with a 16-row seeding rig in tow sat in the middle of the wide street in front of the cafe. The engine was idling, but no driver was in sight. A dusty, full-size pickup was already parked in front of the barbershop, windows rolled down, keys in the ignition, tools in the bed.
I found the pickup's owner, a farmer wearing bib overalls, in the barber chair. He and Gary chatted while the scissors snipped. After a minute or two, the farmer looked over at me and said, "Howdy. Reckon you're the one visiting from Hawaii?"
IN A TOWN of 600 people a dozen miles from the Interstate, nobody is anonymous. It's not that people are nosy -- everybody just knows everybody else and word gets out when folks come by for a visit. The town is one big extended family.
The same two dozen names repeat themselves in the columns of the local weekly newspaper, on the trophies in the glass showcase at the high school, on the tombstones in the well-kept cemeteries.
One summer at the annual rodeo, my wife looked around at the crowd in the bleachers and said, "You know, I think I'm related to just about everybody sitting on this side of the arena."
There's not much for a cop to do in rural Nebraska. You don't swipe stuff from family. If anything important went missing everybody in town would know and the thief would never be able to use it. Animals and equipment worth millions are left outdoors or in unlocked barns.
People never think to lock their doors. It's not unusual to come home to an otherwise empty house to find a visitor waiting in your kitchen to share some gossip over coffee.
BY COMPARISON, Honolulu is a very anonymous place. It's not easy to get acquainted with everyone in the neighborhood in a city where some apartment buildings have more residents than my wife's entire hometown.
I moved into a Makiki condominium years ago. For months, I only knew the super and the woman across the hall. Packed so closely together, we tend to guard our privacy. Too often, however, we treat each other like faceless, nameless transients.
People who blame thefts on the economy ought to take a trip to Nebraska where the cost of fuel, fertilizer and machinery relentlessly mounts while corn, wheat and beef prices hover near historic lows.
Property crime is relatively serious in Hawaii, not because of the economy but because people who steal find it easy to prey on people they don't know and couldn't care about less. What's more, there is seldom a penalty, seldom an inquisitive neighbor, seldom a victim willing to return to press charges.
Hawaii's property crimes per capita statistic is distorted because crimes against 7 million visitors are included in the numerator, but only the state's 1.2 million residents are in the denominator.
Still, there are far too many folks being ripped off and we can't fix that until we become better neighbors.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.