Insert Foot vs. looters and Laura Ingraham.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — I was a block away from Nordstrom when 90 people stormed the store Nov. 20. So naturally, because I’m a highly trained professional news reporter, I missed it.

Total whiff. No clue. Just sat there, with a dumb look on my face, probably trying to remember how Mr. Whoopee from the Tennessee Tuxedo show explained how cars work from when I was a kid.

As far as I’m concerned, if it wasn’t important enough for Mr. Whoopee to explain, then it’s still not important enough to know.

I did hear the sirens and saw the police vehicles flying through downtown Walnut Creek, while I waited to pick up my daughter from her job at Broadway Plaza, literally across the street from Nordstrom. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham heard all the way from whatever lair she lives in.

My daughter, code-named “Olivia” (because it’s her name), missed it too. My nose for news has evidently passed to my offspring. However, she later noted someone had suspiciously placed a 900-feet tall tree containing bright lights and ornamentation that wasn’t there a few weeks ago.

I mean … she wasn’t wrong.

I initially was very busy staring into my phone, just hoping all the sirens weren’t about me being illegally parked. Being a veteran of the news business and all, I did manage to commit to getting out of my car and looking around the corner to see what all the noise was about, in the opposite direction.

I literally turned my head right when, if I turned it left, I might’ve seen the biggest robbery anyone in the city has seen.

But then my kid showed up and I remembered I had important things to rush back to watching on television. I’d just started “The Outsider” on HBO, which is about some really fascinating make-believe crimes, so …

My generation’s greatest philosopher, Ferris Buehler, once said something about life happening so fast you might miss it if you don’t stop once in a while and take a look around. I stopped and looked … and still missed it. Because stupid Ferris Buehler didn’t say anything about looking in the right direction.

I’m still covering the aftermath of the Nordstrom robbery story for a news publication and won’t comment generally on how I feel about the robbery itself because, despite my obliviousness, I still pretend to be professional.

(Not on Fox News, however, which actually named me and referenced my reporting a couple days later during a Laura-Ingraham-hosted segment titled “Trying to Normalize Mass Looting.” That was hilarious if she meant a straight news story about something that was anything but normal).

As a father, however, of course I’m not thrilled armed people with bad intentions are running into stores within 50 yards of my little girl. Three Nordstrom employees got hurt, one was allegedly pepper-sprayed while another was kicked and punched. The city has since committed to spending $2 million to beef up the area’s security and police presence, which helps.

Yow know what else helps? Karate, which I tried getting my kids to learn with mixed success (mixed failure). But there’s always tasers, pet alligators and other self-defense items out there on the interwebs. Christmas is coming…

Life happens, whether we like it or not. That’s not excusing anything. My kids joke about me telling them over and over since they came into existence (really, right there in the delivery room) they need to be aware of their surroundings. As a final joke on me, they’ll probably carve “He should’ve been more aware of his surroundings” on my headstone, after I finally push my luck with a wild animal (I get excited) and a possum eats me.

Life happens everywhere. Even in well-off communities, where hundreds of people can take their outrage to safe online forums from their spaciously warm, upper-middle class homes, blaming everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Santa Claus for bad things without providing constructive solutions.

Everyone needs to try. The world has shown a new capacity for rapid change for which many weren‘t prepared a few years ago. We all need to be more aware of our surroundings. Including dads in illegally parked cars, staring mindlessly into phones. Look up when the sirens start. This isn’t the end of seeing things we never saw happen before.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.