Peace, One Person at a Time

Peace is like money. Once you get some, it’s hard to remember how you got it and how it felt to go without. I took surface streets to my job the other day, and as I passed through a particularly tough stretch of East L.A., I had to remind myself that there had been years when the place didn’t look like a piece of sunny folk art come to life.

There it was, midmorning, in neighborhoods where just a few years ago you couldn’t walk a block without hearing random gunfire, and kids were skipping hand in hand with their gray-haired abuelitas, and clerks at the mom and pop stores were standing in doorways, waving hello. Down at the fish factory, shift workers in shower caps were gossiping and laughing as they lined up at the roach coach for their morning snack. This on a street corner where, a couple of years ago, I drove past a corpse on the sidewalk, and it hadn’t even drawn a crowd.

Can it really have been only 5 1/2 years since the world, ourselves included, was convinced that it was impossible for the tribes of Southern California to get along? Remember all those stories in the sanctimonious East Coast press, how the Golden Dream was morally bankrupt and we were all at each others’ throats?

What happened? Because there was, after all, some truth to the rumors of our decline. It wouldn’t have been too far off the mark to say that many of us hated each others’ guts.

And most of us haven’t changed. So how did it come to this? Did we just fight until we got tuckered out? Or was somebody out there working quietly all along, chipping away at us until we finally, unknowingly, gave peace a chance?

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Last week, they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which, of all the Nobels, has for me always seemed the hardest to pin down. The winner always seems to be a player in some conflict that feels far-off and endless and abstract.

This year’s fight was the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which most Americans paid attention to mainly because it was championed by Princess Diana, who died luridly. In fact, when I saw the front-page photos of Jody Williams, the American who coordinates the campaign, I thought for a split second that I was seeing the late princess from a strange unguarded angle; it took a second look to realize that the light-haired woman in the tank top was an activist meeting the press in her Vermont frontyard.

Williams wasn’t your usual Nobel laureate. For one thing, she was barefoot. For another, she was mean. She called President Clinton a coward and a “weenie” for not signing a treaty to ban the weapons, and her zealousness and spare, woodsy surroundings made you think, ever so slightly, of the Unabomber, as opposed to, say, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

It was hard to imagine her working quietly for anything, or ever contenting herself with chipping away. But one of the press accounts noted that her last cause had involved working among the civil war victims in El Salvador, which was as long and incremental a battle as they come.

And within that story was another detail that, for me, suddenly put the distant laureate in a more approachable light: The El Salvador charity, the story said, had been based in Los Angeles. The Nobel Peace Prize winner had done a stint here. She had been one of those faceless, driven people you so often see bustling around, say, the headquarters of El Rescate in the Pico-Union District, or deploying volunteers to sweep up after earthquakes and fires.

You had to wonder how many other potential peace prize winners were out there in Los Angeles right now, how many other Jody Williamses whose work could use the million-dollar boost of a Nobel Prize. You had to wonder whether peace was not also like charity, which, some have said, begins at home.

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There’s a man, a psychologist named Fred McGregor, who launched a program at a middle school in Huntington Park. Because of Fred McGregor, some 300 kids a year have learned to manage their anger and stay out of fights.

There’s a dancer named Beth Burns who one day joined a convent and, as her mission, began giving free dance lessons to children in a Santa Ana barrio. Today, that project is a ballet company that has become a haven for thousands of impoverished children, and when Burns’ St. Joseph’s Ballet performs, their grace is so stunning and poignant that audiences leave the theater, weeping openly.

There are so many peace prize contenders we never think about. People you read about sometimes in the paper--the dentist who’s trying to set up a free clinic for people on skid row, the woman who saved a man’s life in the riots, who recently died in a car accident. And people you never hear about--good cops, talented mental health professionals, good neighbors who change the world one block party at a time.

Here in Greater Peacetime Los Angeles, it is easy to forget how valuable these people are. And yet no other metropolis in the world, perhaps, has so many factions and potential conflicts, or offers such a microcosm of the planet and all its flaws.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if one of our many millionaires decided to bring a version of the Nobel Peace Prize to this city of the new millennium, to focus on humanity closer to home? Wouldn’t it be something if peace also was like money in that it turned out to be easier than you’d imagine to spread around?

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com