UNCIVIL LIBERTIES : Vandalism, Littering and Other Random Acts of Unkindness
Let me beg off the obvious criticism by agreeing that, in the scheme of things, this is utterly trivial.
Bosnian Serbs are not shelling me as I wait in line at the market. My kids do not have to sleep in the bathtub for fear of midnight gunplay. I have not even witnessed what a friend of mine saw one midnight--a car slowing down, just like in the movies, to dump a woman’s body into the gutter.
Yet there was something soul-corroding about it that makes it more substantial. “It” was a drive-by spray-painting. Someone--two someones probably--drove my quiet street late one night, leveling a stream of blue paint along the length of every light-colored car for two blocks.
They hit, among others, the classic Falcon, the nicely kept Nissan and my battered old Honda, which could stand a paint job but not one so haphazard. It was just a blue streak, as in swearing a blue streak, which is what you heard up and down the street when people discovered the vandalism.
In a city where you may find yourself on hold if you call 911 with a knife in your chest, I was too embarrassed to call the police. But someone called the police. What would you like us to do? they asked. It happens hundreds of times a day. Absent a license plate, an eyewitness, nothing can be done. Now, if they’d spray-painted a gang tag, that would be helpful. Did we need a report for insurance purposes?
(What we really wanted was instant redress. Second-grader antics merit second-grader discipline. I recently heard of a man who came across a graffiti tagger spraying walls. He took the kid in one hand, the spray can in the other, and lavishly painted the kid’s shoes. “You can’t do that,” the kid howled, “those are my shoes!” “Now,” the man said, “you understand what you’ve done.”)
By the next day, most everyone had dipped into the rubbing compound and labored to eradicate the worst of it. But the blue shadow was still there, and like a shadow, it moved with me even when I tried to ignore it.
Los Angeles has proved that it can ride out the big events, even show itself to some advantage. A riot, an earthquake, a fire--these we handle with sturdy aplomb. Acts of God seem to strengthen us, but acts of man eat away at us, one small assault on civility after another, like chewing away mortar so that even if the bricks remain deceptively intact, a good wind can knock them over.
They are cumulative, these assaults, and we tamp them down so successfully that it takes a mustering of memory to bring them forward.
The first, for me, was finding that the night deposit slot at my Los Angeles branch library had been soldered shut. A handwritten sign, frequently torn away and frequently retaped, from the looks of it, explained that because someone had been dropping raw eggs, beer and worse into the book slot, the night depository would be closed indefinitely.
Then I began noticing the unsettling, unclever little vulgarisms (the man in the T-shirt reading “free mustache rides”), and the hostilities (bumper stickers reading “My kid can beat up your honor student”) and the vast, casual id of the man who empties his car ashtray onto the street.
The hunger for civility sometimes comes down to a struggle between pique and instruction. Walking to lunch in Downtown on a hot summer day, I saw a construction worker, on his lunch break, too, simply peel the wrapper off his food and drop it where he stood. “That’s disgusting--pick that up!” someone said loudly.
It was me, I realized; I said it, or maybe my mother said it through me. It is a curiosity of behavioral science that a strange woman can say such a thing to men, whereas another man could not. They might react to women as to their mothers, but they are less likely to beat us up for it.
The construction worker picked up the wrapper. And he looked as surprised at doing so as I was at telling him to.
