"He has the face of a bandit," my Argentine host mother decided after meeting a date who had come to pick me up. "Cuidado." Given that it is a 17th century word now relegated to fantasies of desert places, I was not certain exactly how she meant it. Bandit: one who plunders. Marauder. Robber.
In 21st century America, where it is not uncommon for "registered sex offenders" to look like (or be) your neighbor, it's hard to get your footing sometimes. When belongings are stolen in Hanover, and it could be any smiling Dartmouth student with an ID, discovering your wrong-doer becomes nearly impossible.
While Dartmouth students do tend to engage in occasional thievery with impunity, that is not to say certain unspoken codes do not exist:
1.You do not steal laptops.
2.Your bike will be stolen if you do not put a lock on it. Likewise, it is only natural if you "appropriate" someone else's bike if they lack the foresight to do the same.
3.Jackets get stolen from frats, not rooms. This way you can blame your alcoholic intake when your judgment wavers, not your integrity.
4.Anything "small," or cheaper than $500, essentially, is game if it's left unguarded.
Taking these into account, it would appear that what truly baffles us is not the theft itself but those incidences in which the circumstances of the theft deviate from the accepted codes. Hillary Mimnaugh '11, for example, will leave her laptop out, but never her laundry detergent; it just wouldn't happen someone stealing a laptop. A Psi U recently told me that his roommate freshman year would pinch his clean boxers when he was too lazy to do laundry, an act only pardonable due to his roommate's otherwise charming personality. On the less pardonable side, my friend Sam Epstein '11's organic chemistry textbook was stolen three times in less than a month, at which point she began to wonder whether it was an expensive prank or coincidence. "I didn't even leave it out or visible the third time," she said. And these are America's future doctors.
It is perhaps such a deviation from code that explains my confusion when within two hours of my arrival on campus this term, my leather jacket disappeared. From my room.
While I had recently arrived from the country that produced Nueve Reinas one in which I had to finger every bill a cab driver returned to me to make sure it wasn't counterfeit I left my suitcases packed, lay my jacket on the bed and walked out to a 6:30 meeting. It's Hanover, after all and who goes into someone's room to take things? Two hours later, the jacket was gone. While the fact that someone had entered my room and taken the jacket was not altogether incomprehensible, the fact that S&S told me it mysteriously "appeared" on the steps of Rocky five hours later did. Did the thief experience second thoughts about breaking code by breaking and entering? Do people already drunk that early sophomore summer? I will never know.
It was more absurd than the time someone stole my umbrella in East Wheelock, a cluster which oozes "community support" propaganda to the point where one is immediately suspicious of how well-adjusted a person might be who chose to live there freshman year. There's clearly no problem though, with those who live there sophomore year.
Aside from the fact that most students here would be able to afford a new bottle of laundry detergent, stealing is generally not shunned. It would not surprise me if the opinion were expressed that there's less stigma in publicly vomiting than being caught filching someone else's laundry detergent or a "found" bike. The latter may be thought of as an "appropriation" in the same way the Psi U's athletic roommate thought of his underwear "borrowing" of course, being a nonner, it's altogether probable that I do not understand the deep level of bonding to be relished among sports teams.
While thievery may be a 16th century word, it's a 21st century attitude here in Hanover. If people insist on continuing with the facile appropriation of other people's things, they deprive themselves of the college experience the one synonymous with security that we miss when we leave campus and have to watch our pockets and purses. At the very least, they resign themselves to in-boxes clogged with missing-jacket blitzes.
