The Spotlight Finds a Street-Corner Shrine
The street-corner memorial to Margaret Mitchell was, by the end of last week, so large that it would have dwarfed her, had she been alive. You could see it from the valet parking up and across the street at Ca’Brea, it was that compelling. Actors and socialites just stood staring at it from the posh restaurant doorway, the parking guys murmuring in Spanish, everyone shaking their heads.
In life, she had been all but invisible, the neighborhood bag lady everyone noticed once before mentally editing her out. Now in death, she is indelible, in every paper, on every channel, even on the “Today” TV show the other morning: the tiny homeless woman shot and killed by an LAPD bike cop (film at 11!) for pulling a screwdriver when he tried to take her shopping cart.
Remarkable. Cops and street people have run-ins the way actors do lunch at Ca’Brea. The world long ago registered this fact, and edited it out. What happened to bring this particular set of problems so suddenly into focus? By Friday, most of the corner of 4th Street and La Brea was covered by the shrin--a memorial that was part of the drill for these media-saturated deaths, but was also burgeoning. There was a car--not the cart, but one very much like it. There were yellow zinnias and funeral arrangements of carnations and gladioli and many, many candles. Por Favor, No Mueva El Carro!!! a cardboard sign ordered in a language that couldn’t have been Margaret Mitchell’s. “Please Do Not Move This Shopping Cart!!!”
Someone had crafted an altar out of a wooden pallet. There were a half-dozen stuffed animals, three or four poems, a store-bought sweet potato pie, a foam cup half-filled with coins. In the part of the cart where you’d put something fragile, there was a makeshift memory book on a pad of paper. “May God bring an end to brutality,” some stranger who wouldn’t have known her from Eve had written. And lower down, in humbler letters: “We always seen you on our lunch time at work. You never said much, but we prayed for you.”
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What, then, must we do? This is the eternal question, and in the past week, the search for answers has been as vividly public as that sidewalk memorial. On one morning alone, there were no fewer than four news conferences held by people grasping for some way to reconcile Mitchell’s shooting. Did it say something about homelessness? Race relations? What we’ve come to in Los Angeles?
Even Chief Bernard C. Parks, the old-line LAPD veteran, seeme--behind his obligatory defensive postur--to be searching. Did anyone imagine for a moment, he asked, that his officers weren’t heartsick too? Could the community not see the time bomb that had been created by the treatment of mental illness as something to either be denied or punished? Whose fault was it that not even a lawman could force these people to get meaningful treatment, and that, even when you could persuade them, there were too few places where they could afford to go?
It was oddly reassuring, this spectacle of soul searching, even on its self-serving fringes. (“Where do you want me?” I heard a demonstrator offer, helpfully, in mid-picket to the news crews. “Here with the bullhorn? How ‘bout in front of this flag?”) On one hand, there’s a cheapness in the way interest groups now ritually feed on the spotlight of every grotesque occurrence. And yet, there’s also the sense that the same light is bathing something that, for too long, has been edited from sight.
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What, then, must we do? It’s one thing to put a bouquet on a sidewalk, another to deal constructively with an issue that makes people recoil. Psychiatric-commitment law, for instance, has defied balance for generations. How do you simultaneously force the delusional to get treatment while protecting their civil rights?
Next year, a three-year effort will culminate in Sacramento to fine-tune that law. Meanwhile, two much-needed bills are pendin--one sponsored by Assemblywoman Helen Thomson (D-Davis), the other by Sen. Richard Polanco (D-L.A.--that would force employers to insure treatment for psychological problems at the same level as other health care. Mitchell’s memory would surely be honored if it were to prompt calls and letters supporting serious improvements in access to mental health.
More broadly, though, there is attitude. Mental health is more than some disembodied government issue; it has to do with the deeper matter of whether people connect, day by day. The very fact that we’re talking about the problem is a step toward its solution. There’s progress in that realizatio--in the strangers outside a restaurant, mourning the least of their brethren together, in the tough-on-crime city talking, again, of community.
Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.