Becoming Accustomed to the Unthinkable : Carjackings: Today, even in broad daylight, even in Chatsworth, we aren’t safe from random criminal violence.

Chatsworth is as far northwest as you can go without giving up entirely on Los Angeles. Next stop is Simi Valley, with its movie-set vistas of huge granite boulders and leave-me-out-of-this sensibility.

But Chatsworth is different, an unpretentious mix of new two-story condos and old rustic ranch houses, nestled amid the pines. There’s a big rush to this region’s still-affordable homes with nice back yards. In one of two mini-malls on the west side of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, there are two pet stores less than 50 feet apart--one for fish and reptiles, another for birds and dogs; a bike shop; a store for carpeting and hardwood floors; a place to frame pictures. I counted three preschools within a quarter mile of Devonshire Street. A family paradise.

These days it feels like Paradise Lost. I dropped by Nina’s Mobil Mart on the northeast corner of Topanga and Lassen Avenue, directly across from the pet shops. It was two days after the death of Naghi Ghoraishy, a 74-year-old retiree, during what police described as a “typical, random carjacking.” That such a crime occurred, in such a community, seemed to shake the bedrock. Urban-style grief, whose province lay many miles away, had stormed in through the back door. Who did this crime, and why? No one knows. Ghoraishy, an Iranian who immigrated to the United States nearly 20 years ago to be with his daughter, had been shot in the head at 11 a.m. by a coward whose face was covered by a hood. The assailant had not yet been found by last week, though Ghoraishy’s 1989 gold Mercedes sedan turned up.

The Mobil Mart gleamed with entrepreneurial wholesomeness, newly poured asphalt, bright overhead lighting and those fancy point-of-purchase credit card machines for easy transactions. You’d feel safe here, pumping gas on a major thoroughfare in broad daylight. This is no place to be killed.

“The customers have not come back,” the store manager told me. Business is down as much as 30%. “The people are in shock and they associate what happened with this place. Nothing like this has ever happened here before.”

Last week, a pregnant woman was stabbed to death by a would-be carjacker at a teller machine in Sherman Oaks.

How do we get accustomed to insanity? What are the steps by which we get inured to chaos? When we first hear of it, we are shocked. Horrified. Someone will put an end to this, we say. But then we hear of another instance, and then another. Over and over, the crime comes in waves. A numbness sets in. We begin to know that children get killed in school. That toddlers are sacrificed to drive-by shootings on our streets. And now, cars can be taken with impunity, and you’re crazy if you talk back.

As we are initiated into the world of serious irrational crime, the yearning for satisfactory explanations wanes. Once, a breach of confidence like Ghoraishy’s murder would have initiated deep public self-examination. No more. As neighborhood after neighborhood loses its sense of sanctity, the parameters of community narrow, and the energy for seeking out causes dissipates into despair. We care about the victim, his or her family, and the nourishing part of his surrounding universe. As for the perpetrator and the conditions leading up to his decline, who can be bothered?

Just as the world of illness is divided between the sick and the well, the crime-besieged society quickly splits into “they,” who would blow a person’s brains out for a ride in a car, and “us,” the powerless and terrified keeper of the keys. To understand and attack the causes calls for detachment and quiet cool. All we care about is whether “they” have been caught.

So we see now, in real-life Los Angeles, patience is wearing thin. Carjackings, graffiti tagging, bank robberies: These are the anonymous random outrages that haunt our lives and our dreams. We couldn’t make sense of them if we tried. What is there to learn from the carjackings that filled the news that week? Among the victims were two Beverly Hills matrons who had parked their car in a guarded lot at Van Cleef & Arpels, and a young man driving through South-Central whose 2-year-old son was shot in the legs. Luxury cars were taken, and so were trucks. From Chatsworth and Sherman Oaks to Beverly Hills and South-Central--there is no rhythm, no reason, no decency. No who or why. Just us, vulnerable us.

The news of the latest murders echoed far and wide, wherever citizens once held out hope that there were places where snakes and dogs were sold in stores, not out walking the streets. We know better now.