At the Dark End of the Street

I took a different bus to work today through a part of town that is a little rough. For my adventure I was rewarded with one of the only times in my adult life that I witnessed a street fight. (The other time was at a Dead show.)

The bus was stopped at an intersection and I was fiddling with my Ipod because the Soft Drugs had ended. Then I heard some commotion and looked up to see two swarthy combatants slugging away at each other on the sidewalk. One guy slammed his opponent against the front bus door, shattering it. They continued to brawl across the street. Finally, the "victor" appeared to having fully vented his anger and walked away. The "loser" shook it off and they both disappeared. The bus driver picked up his phone, spoke for a couple of minutes, then informed us that this bus wasn't continuing. We would have to catch the next bus that came along.

I felt nausau from watching the brutality. And a certain admiration for their stamina: I imagined that any one of the blows sustained by "the loser" would have put me on the sidewalk. But he was still able to attempt to defend himself. I felt shame because I felt powerless to stop it and didn't even call 911. I expected the bus driver to do it.

I've been reflecting recently that there is a fundamental difference in how liberals and conservatives digest new information about the world. Liberals mock this difference, saying "facts have a liberal bias." Most notably, this difference was recognized by the unnamed Bush aide who in 2004 dismissed the importance of the reality-based community. Based on unscientific observation I would say the difference boils down to this: liberals tend to take a fact- say "over a billion people per day exist on less than a dollar a day" and their world is shaped by this fact. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to take a few viewpoint- say "they hate us for our freedom" and arrange new information around this perspective.

I imagined that my stereotypical conservatives would view this morning's slugfest as evidence that the City is a bad bad place and the suburbs are great place to raise kids.

Though I felt a visceral reaction to aggression, I was inside the bus and could see their aggression was only directed at each other and didn't threaten to include others. The combat quickly dissolved. I don't think the world is any more dangerous than I did yesterday.

Meanwhile, those actors who make the world considerably less safe go unnoticed. One can suffer from a host of oppressive forces that are not termed "violent" in the general parlance, but are instances of people enduring devastating losses and even death. Frequently, when actions are embedded in our economic system, there is a societal agreement that such behavior is not criminal.

Peel back the headlines that scream the latest looting and shooting and the real impact of "urban problems" pale next to the violence inflicted by large corporations: Sub-prime lenders force thousands from their homes, agri-business sends farmers prison for saving seeds, US Corps of Engineers build sub-standards levees, car manufacturer's products emit fine particulates that ravage fitness buff's lungs, developers build sprawling suburbs that cripple the residents, and HMOs deny or delay coverage that succeeds in killing their customers. Most likely criminal charges won't be filed in against any of the perpetrators of this sort of violence.

My point isn't to trivialize street violence, but to state that our definition of "violence" isn't a big enough net to catch all the criminals that prey upon us.

Afterwards, when I hopped on the next bus, I put my Ipod on shuffle. First song up was Gram Parsons and friends singing "At the Dark End of the Street," immediately followed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra's version of the "Sunny Side of the Street."