Of the Human Spirit and Desperation

Some years ago, when our family was new, we lived on a block of bungalows and Spanish-style homes. It was a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, like many neighborhoods in Southern California. Maybe you live in one: block parties, flower beds, joggers at dawn.

Down the street, there was a house with a front porch and geraniums. A middle-aged couple lived there, no kids. We’d see them occasionally. He was tall, with a penchant for khakis and polo shirts; she was light-haired and her blouses were prim.

She was the co-captain of our block watch, he was said to be an architect. They were people like us, we thought, an ordinary pair. People whose friendship we might cultivate when the jobs and bills and babies left us a moment to come up for air.

One night, while we sat in our living room eating popcorn and watching the luge event in the winter Olympics, the husband in that house was stabbed to death. The police said the wife had come home from a business trip and found him upright in his rocker-recliner, a steak knife in his chest.

“How could this have happened?” we murmured to each other. “Right under our noses. He seemed like such a nice guy. Was there something we could have done?” Such violence, so close--it was unthinkable, yet we couldn’t stop thinking about it, looking for context. You want meaning when someone dies.

So, from sheer speculation, we told ourselves a story of what might have, probably had--in fact, almost certainly had happened, based on how nice the nice man and his nice wife had seemed.

A burglar, we’d decided.

Months later, it came out: The man was desperately troubled, a closet addict who’d invited a transient to his house to party, picked a fight and gotten slashed to death in a haze of cocaine.

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Twice in the past week, Southern California has borne witness to the last acts of the desperately troubled--last Sunday, in the case of a distraught aerospace worker, Ronald L. Taylor, and Thursday, in the case of a distraught HMO patient, Daniel V. Jones. Virtual neighbors by dint of the camera, we hear the refrain of modern suburbia: Such a nice guy . . . Right under our noses . . . Something we could have done . . .

In the Artesia cul-de-sac where Taylor lived with his family, on the Long Beach street where Jones lived with his dog, the people want context. A 46-year-old working man, worried about layoffs, bankrupt, kills his family and leaps from an overpass. A 40-year-old hotel worker, worried about his health, stops traffic on a freeway, unfurls an anti-HMO banner and shoots himself on live TV.

What of these deaths? What of the “people like us” involved in them? It was said of Daniel V. Jones that he was a principled man who wanted his death “to mean something.” It was said of Ronald L. Taylor that he was a “nice guy” who was “close to his family.”

Left unspoken was the rest of it: the ordinary burdens and insults that, for some, weigh to the point of humiliation. The infuriating weakness that can send a man end-over-end into the empowering arms of rage.

This is the human context that we, as neighbors, don’t see or know how to talk about. Better to blame the cruel caprice of the post-Cold War economy. Better to lay it on the peeping media and the heartless health insurance industry.

Better not think about the sides of the human spirit that would have a man in a neighborhood of flower beds and block parties brutally bludgeon his loved ones to death with champagne bottles.

Better not to think about the way a person who murders himself on camera, on a freeway, intentionally implicates everyone who sees or passes him in his death.

Better to imagine that our streets of bungalows and Spanish-style homes house “people like us,” neighbors and friends. We think we see ourselves, each other, so clearly. We know nothing, nothing in the end.

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It is tempting, in the context of a daily newspaper, to look for a “news peg,” a sign of the times. We peer like voyeurs into lives of quiet desperation that, it seems, are suddenly no longer so quiet. What is the meaning? Something about California? Something about social decline?

From sheer speculation, you could craft your own story. But there is no mystery in the events of recent days. It has just come out of the house now, our epidemic of anguish, the ordinary desperation to which, finally, as the playwright Arthur Miller wrote, attention must be paid.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.