Yes, Christine, my exclamation -- "Good grief!" -- was a response to the question you asked, namely: "Doesn't Washington have a lot of desperate poor people on drugs preying on people at night, and a generally high crime rate?"
In this case, at least, the Devil is not as bad as he is painted....Or rather, I should say, what you have in D.C. is pretty much the same picture you see elsewhere, namely, the poor preying on the poor, in their own neighborhoods, where we relatively fat cats never set foot.
I do live in Maryland, but just this side of the District line. YOu can't even tell when you enter Maryland from D.C.; it is less than half an hour to the center by metro; so I definitely don't consider where I live to be "suburbia" in any of the usual senses of the word (except that we are not under the D.C. city government -- yay!).
I hardly ever lock the door of my house (I have a problem with losing keys); I rarely lock my car, which I park in my driveway (no garage); and it would never, never, occur to me to avoid going to a concert in D.C. or a gallery opening or whatever for fear of encounters with "desperate poor people on drugs preying on people at night". Believe me, those desperate poor people do not haunt the Kennedy Center, or hang out in Georgetown or Foxhall...
By the way, did you know that the Washington metropolitan area has the highest per capita income in the country? That came as a surprise to me, considering the high number of blacks in the area as a whole, not just in D.C. proper. That makes yet one more cliched generalization to throw in the dumpster.
Joan
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