Rocinha v. Middle America

– Americans are sort of crazy, aren’t they?

The question came out of nowhere at dinner last night to celebrate my last day of ESL teaching, and it caught me a little off guard.

– What do you mean?

– Well… you know, there are a lot of unbalanced people. And then one day someone goes into the mall and just starts shooting. It’s not like that so much here.

– So, um, you’re saying that Brazil is more… tranquil than the States?

– No, not exactly. But you know, it’s just so easy there to get guns. And everyone has a computer, right?

– I guess, most people…

– … So they all have computers and they play a lot of violent videogames. And well, maybe the culture is different, too. It seems like there are a lot of messed-up people.

Considering that most of my blogging of late has dealt with the question of violence in one form or another, this conversation was definitely food for thought. It’s always a little strange to me to hear how the States are perceived abroad, and interesting to see how some things make such a (to me) disproportionate impression on foreigners. But the most extraordinary thing about this conversation is that the person involved has lived in Rocinha his entire life — and if you’re worried about gun violence then Rocinha is not particularly safe even by Rio’s lowered standards.

So I was left wondering: Rio has its share, and more, of corrupt cops and shoot-to-kill bandidos — but is it somehow comforting that the motivations for the violence are relatively straightforward, and that there are, to some extent, “rules of the game”? A horrifying number of innocent people are killed every year in the drug wars, but is it somehow less frightening because it’s often from stray bullets rather than direct fire? Are the isolated shooting incidents in the US that much scarier precisely because they’re so random, so senseless, and so devastating? Because they happen in places — malls, churches, schools — that should be havens rather than targets?

I tried to say how incredibly rare these disturbed-individual gunfire incidents are in the US, but there’s no denying that they’re more common in the States than in other places… and if even one is unjustifiable, then the number that we’ve had is terrifying. All I know is that if someone who has grown up in Rocinha — a neighborhood that’s seen NUMEROUS people injured and killed in shootouts this year alone — is saying this, we in the States need to do better.