Community Essay : A City Just Itching for a Fight : A misunderstanding in a parking lot stops barely short of a brawl; the veneer of civilization is way too thin.

I was waiting for a space in the parking lot of an upscale market the other day when the expensively dressed driver of an exiting car apparently took offense at my well-intended hand signals.

He was the epitome of every movie character I’ve ever seen itching for a fight. He got out of his car, assumed an aggressive stance, removed his sunglasses, told me he didn’t need my help, that he didn’t like my face and, yes, he “wanted to fight.”

I was incredulous. I didn’t understand how he could possibly have misunderstood my intentions, or what he wanted and why he was willing to fight for whatever it was. When I said I wasn’t interested in doing physical battle, he turned in disgust and--without my help--drove away.

I pulled into his recently vacated space, suddenly realizing that my hand had been close to my heavy metal flashlight. Was I actually as itching for a fight as he was? And over a petty parking misunderstanding? What was going on here?

It didn’t take long for my brain to recognize what I had been seeing regularly in media images of gangs doing their turf thing. I had just been in a turf war. I had stepped into this man’s domain by implying that he couldn’t handle his car. Handling one’s car is, I suppose the suburban equivalent of “kicking ass.”

The demands of an affluent, have-it-all society put lopsided importance on the bigness of our toys, the magnitude of our incomes and our satellite-assisted locations in the social pecking order. Somewhere along the way in the creation of the lauded “Los Angeles experience,” we have set an insidious defensive process in motion. It now requires the merest nudge for the nicest among us to revert to the jungle. The link between what happened to me in the parking lot and a gunpoint holdup at an ATM is stronger than we’d care to think.

In retrospect, reaching for the flashlight now seems perfectly natural, despite my surprise at the threat this young man presented. How many times had I fantasized what I would do if carjacked or threatened at gunpoint. But a parking-lot fistfight?

All living things are, to some extent, territorial. When we have plenty of space within which to walk, hunt and live, we can tolerate others near us. Our ancestors dealt with it as effectively as their beastly neighbors did, there being enough space for everyone. Psychological “space” was not a problem.

We’re animals. We need our space and when we can’t have it we feel like something’s wrong. Trouble is, we don’t always know when our space has been invaded and so don’t know what it is that’s wrong. All we tend to know is that something doesn’t feel right. So we kick the cat. Or maybe the kids. Or the innocent stranger in the parking lot.

That young man, who could just as easily be a friend, is living on the edge of his territory. So am I. We are alert for aggressors and that has displaced our connection as human beings. It’s more gross when the “have-not” with his Uzi robs and kills the “have” with his Rolex, but it’s essentially the same. Space. Territory. We need it. We get it or someone has to pay.

We’re only trying to find relief for this feeling of pressure and we haven’t yet learned, as a species, that aggression won’t do it. In fact, aggression is a desperate, learned response. The wariness and anger with which we encounter our society-mates fortunately is not so ingrained that it can’t be changed. We just have to stop asking the other person to change it for us. It’s not so simple, of course. It does take practice and trust that the other guy won’t take advantage.

Los Angeles has become a city of pressure (though probably not in the league of Sarajevo or even Moscow) where the insidious effects are aggressively played out in ordinary daily life as well as in criminal violence.

Healthy changes must take place at the personal and societal level to reduce the pervasive sense of aggression. Individuals can practice tolerance and patience; governments can embrace a greater humanitarian role. As we work to reduce the pressures caused by inequity, powerlessness, desperation and the compromised American Dream, things might change. I, meanwhile, have decided to put my flashlight out of reach until I can be trusted with it.