I have got to move out of this neighborhood. Not only do I have to contend with the neighbors, but I have to watch the trailer trash and illegal immigrant types let their kids run around loose in the parking lots,… as though cars don’t drive around there legally, as potential killers of human offspring. Talk about retroactive birth control! The parents either don’t know, don’t care, or don’t pay attention.

On our weekly grocery shopping trip today, I actually had to intervene because the parents were off in an apathetic ignorant never-neverland. I was sick of seeing half-eaten fruit and half-opened packages in the corners and hidden nooks of the place, where parents regularly let their kids take or vandalize without paying — a valuable lesson in honesty, courtesy, and good citizenship, sure. I was sick of searching for a good loaf of bread, where the plastic wasn’t poked with holes and the bread wasn’t already manhandled by small fingers, when out of the blue I spotted a child poking at the plastic packaging of the crab in the seafood section. His finger was pushing inexorably downward, the plastic yielding, stretching, on the point of breaking.

The parents were five feet away and not even looking in the kid’s direction. He was about six or seven, maybe eight. From the look of it, he was old enough to know better, but he essentially didn’t have any adult supervision, so I had no choice; I used my stern but calm adult stranger voice.

“Don’t poke holes in that.”

The way he jumped in startlement told me he wasn’t used to being watched, wasn’t used to being reprimanded, wasn’t used to being told what not to do. He slid me a guilty glance, then continued poking, although no longer hard enough to actually make holes.

“Thank you,” I told him, but he avoided looking at me.

I shook my head and rolled my eyes, disgusted with his bad parenting.

Later, at the checkout counter, a woman in line took a call from her cell phone and talked loudly enough for us to hear a conversation we didn’t want to know about — where words like “jail” were bandied about in the same breath as “just got out.”

It could have been worse, of course. It could have been as bad as the night the news junkie overheard a woman talking on her cell phone about a 187 (a murder), where it turned out the guy she was talking about (someone she knew!) got charged with assault, blah-blah, blah-blah.

For crying out loud — what hell is this anyway, and where is the exit?

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