CommentsBELL VIEW--Yesterday morning LAPD took a homeless man from the front seat of my neighbor's car. My neighbor noticed him as he loaded his kid's into their car seats. The man was asleep, oblivious, he did not stir. My neighbor waited for LAPD on his front lawn, with a baseball bat in his hand. Just in case.
After a while, LAPD arrived on the scene. The officers spoke briefly to my neighbor, then approached the car cautiously. My four-year-old son is fascinated by the police -- terrified and enthralled -- so we watched from behind our hedge.
What followed was -- to me -- the most remarkable unremarkable event I had witnessed in a long time. The police calmly approached the car, quietly opened the door, and gently woke the man sleeping in the passenger seat. At first, he was disoriented, didn't know where he was, said something about "gravity." His face, flushed from sleep, was wet with sweat – brought on, no doubt, by a combination of the morning sun beating through the closed window and whatever he was sleeping off making its way through his system.
And then something remarkable happened. The officer placed his hand gently on the other man's head, and lowered it down so that it would clear the top of the door. I'm not sure my four-year-old caught it, but the gentleness in that officer's touch of the homeless man's head spoke to me about a deeper lesson we all need to be reminded of every so often.
My car broke down in the desert on my way from Chicago to Los Angeles. A couple years later, I broke up with my then-girlfriend -- so I had to start taking the bus. People would actually say to me "You can't get there on public transportation." Seriously. People believed that about LA. The truth is, of course, you can get there. You can get anywhere in this town if you're willing to stand in the hot sun for a half hour.
It was on a city bus in LA that I had a profound realization about urban living: manners count. Manners are a moral issue in a big city. One formulation of Kant's categorical imperative is: "Always treat everyone as an end in him or herself, and never merely as a means to an end." When you step onto a city bus and take your seat, it doesn't take long to realize what kind of bus you're riding on. Either the driver takes his job seriously, or he doesn't. Either she understands the great responsibility she accepts every day, or she thinks being a bus driver is a shitty job.
I once read that, on the South Side of Chicago -- after the CTA started hiring black men (and only men) as bus drivers -- that those drivers would wear their uniforms to church on Sunday. The bus driver of today who understands this level of pride in a job well-done makes living in a place like Los Angeles bearable.
It feels as if everything has become so complicated, but everything has always been complicated. Institutional racism exists. Privilege is real. Hatred will never stop until it destroys everything. When children are ripped apart by shrapnel, it is one man touching another man's head with kindness that gives me hope. It is the only thing that gives me hope.
(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.)
-cw
