Street harassment by the unemployed overwhelms the self and breeds a desire for anonymity

Evidence

In addition to jeers and insults, embarrassments and shocks, and dangers to self and property, it seems likely that the petit bourgeois were also subject to another less threatening, but perhaps no less irritating, form of harassment: they were constantly accosted on the streets by the unemployed, begging, offering services, or asking for jobs. A recent visitor to Guatemala City (where-as in the historic early industrial city-massive numbers of rural immigrants are swelling the ranks of the unemployed) reports that it was impossible to walk down the streets without being subjected to a continual stream of offers to wash his car, polish his car, shine his shoes, bless his car, and so forth, and to a continual stream of requests for money. He adds that he soon found himself becoming irritated by all this “assault” on his self and wanted nothing so much as the right to be left alone (personal communication). The proud but defenseless middle class of an earlier period must have felt much the same way. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s stated purpose — this is the psychic limit of civil inattention; the constant address blocks the observing self’s defenses. Connects to Simmel’s blasé attitude and Cole’s weaponized detachment.
• QUESTION: Lofland compares early industrial England to contemporary Guatemala City — worth chasing how street-level job-seeking harassment functioned as urban ordering in both.