Intolerance is something that has always bothered me.

Growing up in a relatively confederate part of rural America, I was exposed to a fair share of ignorance and hate. I lived on the border of what were then two very rural counties, equidistant from each county’s flagship KKK headquarters. There were regular rallies, and although the scope of their strength was nowhere near what it had been decades earlier, the evidence of their legacy remained clear. The confederate flag was displayed prominently, from residential flagpoles to diesel truck antennae, and flying over a nearby stretch of interstate was the largest flag I’ve ever seen, confederate or otherwise, a massive rebel-crossed reminder of the controversial reality of its own dubious symbolism.

This is a current thing.

But it wasn’t only racial intolerance that prevailed in and around my hometown. This is a place where “faggot” as a derogatory term has remained a part of the vernacular, where the homeless are targets of routine random violence, where in a man in a Wal-Mart parking lot can be shot in the face after accused of being a Muslim. This is in 2013. Sadly enough, this broad stroke of anecdotal evidence could explain thousands of communities across America. And that, I always thought, was part of the problem. What about someone’s differences can make someone so angry, they’d want to hurt them, or even worse?

This is behavior with which I have grown unfamiliar in recent years. The urban centers that I have called home since I left my hometown in 2005 have been diverse and, relatively speaking, accepting. And Los Angeles, for all its faults, seems almost oblivious to a person’s ethnic makeup or DNA, focusing instead on the whether the threads that cover them up are stylish and appealing. Generally speaking, it is extremely rare to experience someone trying to hurt another person just because of their appearance.

Yet a few days ago, I witnessed one of those moments.

I came to the public library to get some writing done and research literature for an upcoming film project I’m working on. I also came to avoid the office’s cleaning crew. Since I am home-free, I don’t always have a place to go when my usual haunt (the office) is occupied. The library is a logical alternative. It’s comfortable. It’s quiet. It’s safe. I decided to make a day of it. I donned a rockin’ pair of low-tops and a smart v-neck, parted my hair in the off-center style of the day, and was on my way.

So after browsing the shelves for titles on colonial history, I passed a girl in a blue blouse who smiled at me. It was a nice gesture–it always is when you share smiles with a stranger. I continued on and found a seat in a row of individual chairs flanking the non-fiction shelves and began drafting a piece for this very blog. When I write, I lose myself in thought. I settle into a daze of ticker-taped ideas. I relax. And in moments in between inspiration, I fall asleep. So when I nodded myself awake at 3:00pm, I thought nothing of it. I just returned to my writing, a touch groggy but with refreshed perspective.

A few minutes later I heard faint snoring. Two chairs down, about twenty feet away from me, a man is hunched over in his chair, a book rested in his lap. Like me, he seemed to have fallen asleep. His snoring I could do without. But faced with this atmosphere of comfort and security, I could hardly blame him. A minute or so passed before the snoring ceased, which is about when two security officers walked up to a girl next to the sleeping man, mumbling to her something indecipherable before asking, “This guy here?” I heard her say yes. It was the girl in the blue blouse. The one who had smiled at me earlier.

When the officers asked him to wake up, the man apologized. The officers were kind enough, accepting his apology and moving on. This made me curious though: What if the officers had arrived a few minutes earlier? Would they have approached me, laptop in my lap, and asked me to wake up? I peered over at the man. He had since risen from his chair. He didn’t look particularly homeless. He dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. His hair was kept short and he had some facial hair, but nothing particularly scraggly. As I studied him, he picked up two large duffel bags and turned towards the door.

The duffel bags. Excess baggage. A symbol of a mobile lifestyle.

On the man’s way out, he stopped at the feet of the girl who had been mumbling with the security officers. She was seated on the floor, reading a book. His speech was just within earshot, and I could hear him ask, “Are you Marcela?”

“What.” she said curtly, not quite posing it as a question. I leaned over, trying to get a closer look at this girl. She wasn’t smiling anymore. I will guess that she was in her 20s, dressed conservatively for a sunny late-April day in Santa Monica. She had dark hair, pulled back in a pony tail, and spoke clearly and confidently. She appeared to be of Latin descent, the same as the man with the duffel bags.

“Is your name Marcela?”

“What are you saying?”

Her voice was sharp, cutting. Heads were beginning to turn in her direction.

“I just wondered if you are Marcela, you–”

“–Get away from me!”

“–You look like someone–”

“–Leave me alone! You are homeless!”

The man started to walk away. But the girl wasn’t done.

“I’m trying to read a book! I don’t want to talk to you! You’re homeless!”

The man was now almost out of sight, but turned back briefly with a look of disgust and confusion.

He didn’t say a word. He just kept walking. Then he disappeared behind the stacks, and the girl returned to her book. And everyone who had witnessed it returned to what they were doing as well.

But something about the exchange made me extremely uncomfortable. I could no longer focus on what I was doing. What gave this girl the right to talk to this man that way? This man’s approach was at worst awkward. His body language was composed and innocent, and his words somewhere between genuine and nervous. Yet her words were broiled in vitriol, steamed in hate, and directed at a condition for which I couldn’t help but identify. Her aim was not simply to get him to move on–in fact, once he did, her words became even more odious. Her aim was to hurt him.

But she had done more than that. There in that sterile security of the non-fiction shelves, this girl in the blue blouse resurrected from the library’s relative peace centuries of socioeconomic oppression. She took a term as broad as to include an estimated 100 million of Earth’s population–homeless–and branded it as a slur, hurling it across the room with the fervor of a mother grizzly bear who feels her cubs are threatened. Something inside of her made her hate this man. Something made her want to hurt him. And the biggest insult she could conjure was to say that he didn’t have a home.

I was raised to respect every person, regardless of their background, and to treat everyone with equal care and kindness, even if they wronged me. But I wanted to hurt this girl. My urge was to shame her for what she had said, to curse at her and spit in her face. My urge was to approach her, to encourage her to smile at me once again, then tell her I would so much as smile at someone so vile as her, and to let her know that I too was homeless. I wanted to make her regret her words.

The truth was, each one of my urges included something just as disgusting as what I’d witnessed. My instinct for justice was pure, but my methods in meeting that justice were hypocritical. My insults were just as nasty as hers. My physical intimidation even worse. Even a verbal confrontation achieved nothing but the further disturbance of the peace. Nothing I thought of was appropriate. Intolerance is rarely changed through coercion. Yet despite this I couldn’t let go of the feeling that I had to react. In the scheme of things, it may have seemed small, but I had to do something to stand up against ignorance.

So I wrote the following note, and I dropped it beside the girl in the blue blouse as I walked out:

“Dear Stranger,

Take care with how you treat others. Some day fate might not be so kind to you.

– Fellow Stranger”

Whether or not it had an affect, I’ll probably never know. But it felt like the right thing to do.

. . .

Addendum:
In 2011, over 30 homeless people were killed in violent attacks in this country. There has been (failed) legislation to include attacks on the homeless as hate crimes at the federal level. If you are interested in reading more about this problem, read the most recent NCH study on anti-homeless violence here: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/hatecrimes/hatecrimes2011.pdf.

. . .

Thank you for reading.

– TOH