Long time, no reflect.
We are members of a locale-based facebook group where people buy and sell, and sometimes share news. Several have reported 'prowlers' and a few have been burgled.
We were burgled once. I never felt much of the sense of violation that others report - for once the anxious depressive stance fitted the times, instead of being a strange cloud. My main thought was that someone was willing to treat me as an object - that my friendship was worth less to them than my carcase.
Christmas time is a great season for burglary, a great season for layoffs, for less shifts for casuals, and for the difficulty of finding presents for the children (or meth, I guess) to be overwhelming. If I want to be a friend to a (potential) burglar, I reckon the way to do it (which I am quite a bit too crappy to actually do) would be to put a PS4 on the doorstep with 'for the undeserving poor' on it.
It's important to remember that this is only nice gesture, and the gulf between me and a would-be burglar is pretty wide: I have not transformed him or his further burglary and made them more damnable. There is a temptation when you have reached out a little way, to blame all the failure on the other. The ATO, for example, provides a lot of support - but precisely proportional to the support to get it right, is the intense prosecution of wrongdoing.
