(A) Salt & Pepper

Police description of "wife-beater" outfit of alleged gang member

Police description of "wife-beater"
outfit of alleged gang member

     You've likely heard that old joke of two peanuts walking in the park: one was a salted.  Ha-ha, and it's something most of us can chuckle about because few of us have actually been assaulted, that is unexpectedly confronted, pushed and suddenly finding ourselves dodging punches or heaven forbid, knives or guns (and here I openly apologize to the millions of women and children who are victims of domestic violence and are indeed physically or verbally assaulted every day in their homes).  And one certainly doesn't expect this to happen when walking with your friends on a popular hiking trail, but that is exactly what happened.  Apparently, my friend had asked some girls to turn down their phone's music at a lookout by a lake, a place where pretty most everyone came to enjoy not only the view but also the quiet (there were people who thanked him for saying something to the girls).  When the girls blew him off, saying it was their "free will," he left me to approach them (full disclosure: the girls were 60% behind a boulder so I couldn't see or hear what actually went on from there but apparently he tried to reach for their phone which is when one of the girls told him to "f#%k off" and threatened to pull out a knife).  And to be honest, I'm not sure why he bothered since we were continuing our hike in the opposite direction.  But one of the girls must have called their gang-member boyfriends, cousins or whoever (and here I'm using the police descriptions of those who showed up) because as we descended over an hour later, two 20-something guys rapidly approached us, chests puffy and obviously quite angry.  "Are you the two that shoved someone," they asked, which puzzled us for several reasons because the word "shove" implies pushed, as if asking if we had physically pushed someone (I hadn't, and I trusted that my friend had done nothing physical either).  No, I replied to the first guy, asking if whoever had told them this had given them the wrong description because, well, we were old guys (only later did we piece together that one of the girls must have called them).  But when I looked to my right, the other guy had already shoved my friend to the ground and was swinging away in a seemingly uncontrolled rage.  When I saw the first swing, I tried to use my hiking pole as a makeshift barrier to perhaps break up this case of mistaken identity (my wife later telling me that when I did that both of the guys looked my way as if they were getting ready to jump on me, none of which I felt or saw, perhaps thinking I was planning on jabbing them with my hiking stick).  Fair fight, I guess, for this 20-year old to be beating up a 67-year old guy who uses two walking poles when he hikes.  Was this his gang's version of being "macho?"  It must have seemed so to the guy wearing a F**K ICE tee as he pounded away.  The police, later watching the video and pictures of the scene (for two other girls going up had stopped and were immediately on the phone to the police), described the alleged gang member guy talking to me as someone wearing "wife beater" clothing, a term I'd never heard but was eerily descriptive.  Bottom line when all the punching was over, not much physical harm had been done since my friend, even though awkwardly pinned down, dodged the punches and suffered only what he described as a "bitch slap" before the two got up and walked away (although his eye was still bruised a week later).  By the time we had calmed down and continued down to the bottom of the trail, the two toughies were long gone.  The police who met us there reported that they never saw any two males coming down who matched what was described on the phone, but took the time to physically check each car in the parking lot in case the wannabes lay in waiting.  The police took a report, circled the parking lot until we got in our cars, then drove off, as if this display of anger and perhaps gang initiation was not that unusual for them, and that yes, it could and does happen on a populated hiking trail (at this point, some big kudos to the two girls who not only turned around and immediately called the police, but stayed on the line with them until the two gangsties began to leave).  Both shaken and stirred, we could only view this as a strange way to "enjoy" getting outdoors.

End point of our hike...

     Several friends who have dealt with this sort of thing, told us that we were right to not escalate the situation, not to tackle them or to shoot pepper spray in their faces, or to pull out a knife, or to pretend we were Bruce Lee because we had watched so many kung fu movies.  This is not your world, one said, it's theirs.  And they were absolutely correct.  I am older and perhaps wiser enough to know that walking away or backing down doesn't mean cowardice as much as common sense.  I am no street fighter, and no longer 20, and certainly not like them who are probably used to being pushed and shoved and punched...and reacting back.  Adrenaline flowing, we recapped all that had happened, puzzled at what these two young men must have felt to be confronting and in the case of my friend, beating up someone who was probably older and more feeble than either of their grandfathers (and full disclosure, I know ZERO about the rules or etiquette or moral limitations of today's world of gangs but in our 40+ years of hiking outdoors, we have never encountered any ill will on trails, at least not from people...of any age).  But it did make me think of how little I knew of that world of gangs and how fortunate I was to be removed from that violence.  Did either of them have a knife or a gun?  Were they after only my friend since they didn't seem that interested in me, other than to keep me away from breaking up the fight.  What would or could I have done differently in those brief 60 seconds while my friend got shoved to the ground, part of which time was just making sense that this unreal situation.  And what did those girls my friend spoke to tell their friends to make them react so violently?   Did the girls embellish the story a bit, or did my friend actually push them?  So many unknowns.  That said, I can't imagine being in a bar where a fight breaks out because of words getting out of hand and where bottles are broken and waved around (this recently happened to another friend of mine who saw such a fight where the swinging bottle apparently --and accidentally-- cut a man's throat; my friend reacted quickly, applied a series of bar towels to the wound and was credited days later with saving the man's life).  Neither can I imagine walking on a downtown street, hearing shots break out, and finding a bystander dead on the ground (this also happened recently in my city of Salt Lake when Liberty Valance-type "peace-keepers" spotted what they felt was a guy ready to fire into a crowd of protesters and began shooting to take him down...our courts are still divided on whether to charge the proud-boys type men whose stray bullets killed an innocent person, even though the police did catch a rifle-carrying gunman who never appeared as if he would fire; note: open carry of weapons is allowed in Utah).  And neither can I picture myself riding a mountain bike in our non-busy neighborhood, one with dead-end streets and local traffic only, looking down at the gears and then not noticing a parked trailer and ramming into it (my neighbor did just that, breaking his neck in the process and dying soon after).  And then there's Charlie and Jeffrey....

     I won't spend too much time with these names making the rounds, much more so on conservative news channels, but Charlie Kirk was a 31-year old whose xenophobic "live by the sword, die by the sword" speeches quickly earned him enough to buy a $4.5 million home in a gated community, as well as attract the ear of Trump who has now declared Kirk's killing an "act of political violence" and wants to posthumously award him the Medal of Freedom, much as he did for a similar media host, Rush Limbaugh (ironically, Trump has never issued any condolences to the Minnesota state representatives gunned down at their homes when they answered their doors...both of them, as well as their spouses, were Democrats -- the young man who shot Charlie Kirk was both white and a registered Republican, and despite certain media reports, bullet casings from the shooter did not reference transgender people but had words such as "fascist").   And convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein somehow managed to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into JP Morgan Bank each year, even ensnarling the successor to Jamie Dimon.  Wrote a piece in The NY Times: Epstein kept hundreds of millions of dollars at the bank.  At one point, he generated more revenue than any other investor client in JPMorgan’s private-banking division, which caters to the richest of the rich.  So how did we come to this point in America?   Barron's reported that 70% of those polled no longer believe in the "American Dream."  The NY Times Magazine wrote that last year, about a fifth of Americans believe political violence is at least sometimes justified, and at least half agree that it’s sometimes justified if the other political party committed violence first.  And The Conversation wrote: Numerous studies have found that the number of attacks and plots against elected officials, political candidates, political party officials, and political workers is exponentially higher now than in recent history.  In examining 30 years of data, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found the number of attacks and plots in the past five years is nearly triple that of the preceding 25 years combined.  Some conspiracy theorists are already hinting that Kirk's shooting was a JFK-style assassination ordered by those higher up in an effort to divert attention from Trump's alleged ties to Epstein.  

My grand-nephew's scope view from his post-WW II Mauser 30.06

     All of what is happening, including what happened during our hike, is beyond me.  My friends were right in saying that this wasn't my world, even if it now seems that it obviously is.  The more I talk with friends, the more I'm surprised to discover how many of them carry guns.  To help me understand a bit of this, my grand nephew boils gun talk down to a level many non-gun people like me can understand, in his blog, even providing a "guide" of sorts for those of us who don't own, want, or feel the need for a gun.  Like many of my friends, my grand nephew is a combat veteran, respects and shoots often at practice ranges, and has detailed knowledge of how and when to use a variety of weapons.  In one text he wrote: The 30.06 deer rifle is more of a threat to an armored soldier or a politician or a Gestapo thug than any assault rifle.  As to Charlie Kirk, he speculated: ...whatever hit him was NOT a .30 caliber round; those are way louder and more graphic.  It was a .223 Remington or very close equivalent, the same round fired in most AR15s...But those .223 small rounds also offer combat advantages: low weight, low recoil impulse, high cyclic rates of fire, less heat buildup per firing cycle...it is cheap, ubiquitous, accurate and devastatingly effective against an unarmored target.  A nice clear windless day from 200 meters or so?  Don't even need to "aim" really, just line up on the torso center chest and pull the trigger.  Violence, and now guns...again, it's not my world.     

     But let's get back to the fight, the salt and pepper, the rich and poor, the privileged and the not.  I tried to think back to earlier and when and what happens to cause people to shift in a direction, whether that involves making a decision to become racist or to become violent, to seek confrontation or to become submissive, or any of a hundred other traits.  Certainly the basis of much of that must originate from our upbringings and whatever our parents and friends and peers consciously or unconsciously taught us.  But it still seemed that at some point, something inside of us would gnaw at us to let us know that what we were doing was wrong.  Or was I simply looking at it that way because I was "privileged?"   It's an odd word that, a word that implies a special talent, or having money or status, or at the very least, having an easier life than most.  And when my wife and I look around, we are always grateful that we are comfortable and fortunate to be where we are both in health and to have made it this far in our lives, so we try to give back.  And we try to talk to everyone, to try to see everyone as a person and a person able to be talked to.  So when something such as that assault happens --encountering such a negotiating shut down, and such a wall of anger and rage, and such a tension that seems truly on the verge of "pulling the trigger"--  it makes us realize that we may indeed be walking around with rose-colored glasses.  As our friend's military date told us, there are bad actors out there.  But why, I wondered?  Is it a feeling of not having what others have, or frustration, or being put down or being kept down?  As Cecelia Krull sang:* If I’m losing now, but I’m winning late, that’s all I want...Growing up alone, it seems so short I can’t explain...I don't care at all...Lost my time, my life is going on.

Photo: Hells Angels Richmond

Photo: Hells Angels Richmond

     As I've noted before, both my wife and I grew up poor; and it was only when my mom remarried (I was around 9), we moved to southern California and to the "right" side of the tracks.  Don't get me wrong, the railroad tracks were literally just behind our backyard, we kids climbing over the fence to put pennies and bent nails on the tracks, the heavy wheels of the train turning them into playful swords, or flat pennies.  But even then, we kids somehow began to process that on the other side of those tracks --where housing sat, housing much like that which we had just left-- was now on that side.  The tracks were the dividing line between a choice of good schools or not-so-good schools.  As kids, of course, we actually know none of this since we were still poor; my parents told me early on that we got what we got, generic jackets and shoes from the PX, nothing name brand or fancy.  Still, we blended in, joining the many others in the same situation, admiring the girls who were dropped off in their parent's fancy cars while the other 90% of us walked to school (I don't remember even seeing a school bus in all my years of grade, middle, or high school; ironically, our state of Utah just passed its own law that to now ride a school bus a child must live at least 2 miles from a school, which was about the distance we walked as kids).  Back then, I never saw gangs, at least not in school.  Hell's Angels were a popular motorcycle gang, their denim jackets emblazoned with their "chapter" on the back, an insignia that covered pretty much the entire back of the jacket (no leather jackets back then); they would be difficult to miss...but I never saw them.  Then we heard of the Bloods and Crips fighting it out in prisons, but again I never saw them.  Today, LA County has an estimated 450 gangs, wrote Wikipedia...

Calabasas landfill at top.  Photo: Kevin Cooley NY Times

      Growing up, I felt that everyone had dreams of a better life, whatever that version might entail.  As Sergio Mendes sang back then: The dark is filled with dreams, so many dreams, which one is mine?  One must be right for me.  But what if today's stark inequality was equally present back then, that some people simply saw no future  For them, it would seem that some people would always have it better, the odds in their favor because of color or income or parents or living on the right side of the tracks...some would simply have "privilege."   This stark reality came when the NY Times Magazine had a piece on the LA fires some months ago and the clearing of the land, an area where nearly every home had plastic "Trex" decks, foam insulation (or worse, older asbestos), propane tanks, weed killers, varnished & painted cabinets and walls, vinyl floors, cleaning agents, all of which burned into the air or turned into ash that blanketed the soil and sank into the water table or washed away down city drains and out to the rivers or the ocean.  The cleanup involved going in quickly (the Olympics were again arriving in 3 years, after all), removing 6-inches of contaminated soil to reach an accepted "safe" level of ground, all of which would require removing 5000 tons of ash and soil every day for the next 6 months.  It was thought that 100,000 dump trucks working around the clock would be enough.  It wasn't (nearly double that was needed).  Nearby sat a landfill barely used, but one which sat above what had now become an expensive neighborhood, as in Hollywood actors and other such occupants of $2-4 million homes...Calabasas.  The residents weren't happy.  As one of the wealthy residents told the Times reporters: What good is privilege if you’re still being poisoned?  And as both the paper and sociology professor, Robert Bullard noted: ...white environmentalists made NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) cases against hazardous waste, government and industry responded with what Bullard called the “PIBBY” principle: “place in Blacks’ backyard.”  This wasn't new, the separation of have and have-nots began long ago wrote Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, and that if you did not fit into your then-religious designated caste, you were an out-cast(e).  Little seems to have changed...except that is IF that is the only way you look at things.  Here's how Qasim Rashid viewed the shooting of Charlie Kirk: ...he falsely claimed “guns save lives,” and even argued it was “worth it” for some people to die from gun violence every year just so the Second Amendment could exist.  He dehumanized immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, Black people, Palestinians, women, and more [but].for me, this is a moment to double down.  To expand our spheres of compassion.  To deepen our service to humanity.  To increase our engagement with those willing to engage.  To refuse to give up hope on this country and this world.  And to continue our fight for justice for all people.  Because at the end of the day, I have little doubt that those in power will try to use Kirk’s death as an attempt to further divide, create discord, and create distrust.  So why have empathy for those who show none?  Because empathy is our inoculation to that hatred and fear.  It is not weakness.  It is strength.  It is not acceptance of violence and bigotry.  It is rejection of cruelty and hate. We have empathy, not dependent upon whether others behave like decent human beings—but because we are decent human beings.

    And so it was that my neighbor down the street, who's a vocal instructor, invited us to her annual "soirée" as she put it, a pot luck event where each of her 45 students would stand before a mic and sing their hearts out, from little 4-year old tykes to adults studying opera.  And the music ranged from traditional to Broadway, and from folk songs to yes, opera.  It was a grand evening, a nice balance for me after all that had happened recently.  There was more of course.  There was the story in Deadspin of the softball team in Juarez, Mexico, a team that would make the regular trip across the border to not only play but to be booed and jeered and called names, but who also were supported by a steady flow of fans who made the same journey.  It's an excellent story, and despite not having not won a game in 9 years, the team hurdles are less about what they faced across the border, but more what they had to face when they returned home to a land of cartels and rough lives and reaching for dreams...an uplifting story worth reading.  Then came the story in The Washington Post about the resilience of the dogs rescued and rehabilitated from the Michael Vick dog-fighting ring, a rescue that often involved volunteers spending 24 hours with each dog, sleeping with them, teaching them to play and to feel freedom, helping them to learn that they didn't have to cower when a person walked in, and that they could come out of the shadows to be petted and eventually adopted, one even learning that being at a cabin in the woods was a good thing, even when it was filled with families gathering for a weekend.   And there was the tale in the NY Times of the millionaire financial advisor who decided that he really wasn't helping people in the way which he wanted and left to become a paramedic, but an elite one as in one who ventures into the areas most won't go...dangling over bridges, crawling under collapsed structures, and eventually leading the team that does this sort of rescue.  And then came the tale of Mercy Chefs in AARP, a tale of hotel manager Gary LeBlanc and his wife, Ann.  As he told the magazine upon seeing the flooding of Hurricane Katrina (his grandmother was there): ...what he saw shocked him.  At makeshift relief centers, people were being handed cold green beans straight from the can.  “It was the worst week of their lives,” he says.  “And we were feeding them like they didn’t matter.  Food kept them alive, OK -- but it didn’t help them feel human.”...On August 29, 2021 --16 years to the day after Katrina made landfall-- Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana. Mercy Chefs rolled in with two mobile kitchens and one idea: “We wanted to do something different,” Ann says.  They grilled steaks...When I ask him what he says to someone who wants to help but doesn’t know how, Gary thinks back on his Katrina moment: “Start with what you can do,” he says.  “Even if it’s just one hot plate.  That’s how you tell someone: ‘I see you. You matter. You’re not alone.’”  Mercy Chefs has to date served over 29 million hot, cooked-from-scratch meals in a variety of cities faced with disasters.

     So maybe take a lesson from those stories, that there will be things that we can't control, and things that we can.  That there will be some who have it easy and many who don't.  That there will be shootings we can prevent, and shootings we can't.  And that we may unexpectedly encounter violence and likely not understand it.  War, hunger, homelessness, discrimination, deportation, threats to our lives, all things most of us have been fortunate enough to watch through rose-colored glasses.  But we also have the option to take off those glasses, to look at those things from a different angle, and to see that despite the spread of false information of fear and hate, that there is a lot of kindness and decency and empathy going round, and that it is likely far more prevalent than the "news" makes it out to be.  There's hope, even if you are lucky enough to never encounter a world that's not yours.  As Father Boyle said, (mentioned in an earlier post and the founder of Homeboys which helps steer gang members to a clearer path forward) the tough-sounding Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes once pulled up in a white limousine wearing a bullet-proof vest and surrounded by a security detail...this was certainly not his world.  

    Those worlds exist, and we may never understand them...but we can have an open mind, and empathy, and hope for change.  As the late Jesse Colin Young sang: Sometimes I can’t help cryin.’  People when I hear about the dying.  Young men, women, children, by the violence they’ve endured.  Just start.  Yes, people we got to stop.  My God, yeah, sisters and brothers do you hear me?  We got to stop killing one another.  Even Bryan Keogh, the managing editor of The Conversation, wrote: Amid a steady drumbeat of depressing news stories, I relish the nuggets that point to positive developments – particularly when their causes can be chalked up to the collective efforts of millions of Americans, regardless of political stripe.  Perhaps as my hiking friend tried to suggest, can we just turn it all down a bit?   A chance is opening up in these dark skies of ours  Look anew, up in the sky...it's there.

*Krull shot to international fame when her song was picked as the theme song for the Netflix series, La Casa de Papal (released in the US as The Money Heist).  It became and remains one of the most watched series on Netflix.  As a personal opinion, the first 2 seasons has remained one of the most intriguing and flawless series we've seen, all the loose ends tied up and catching you off guard up to the end.  The seasons that followed were captivating but nowhere close to matching the complex puzzle that made the initial 2 seasons so compelling...this 2018 production, revised and condensed by Netflix, is still worth watching.