Look Around And Tell Me What You See

Today, as I crossed Wilshire Boulevard on my way to the pharmacy during my lunch break, I heard a loud thump behind me. I turned around just before I reach the opposite curb and saw what looked like a homeless man pounding on the driver's-side window of an expensive car. Two thumps later, the window shattered. The man muttered something and loped off while the woman driving the car shouted, not very loudly. She sped down the road toward Flower. At first I thought she was going to pull into an alley and either block the window-breaker's progress or get out and smack him around, but she screeched onto Flower and sped away.

This is one of those incidents you see from time to time that make you wonder what the heck happened, and if you're of a contemplative turn of mind, this sort of occurrence can show you something about your own unexamined assumptions.

For instance, I figured the lady in the car had bumped into the homeless man, or cut him off, or some such thing, because I'm a good liberal Jew Commie and assume that the rich are always in the wrong. Pretty soon it dawned on me that maybe the homeless guy just thought the lady in the car had done something to him, flipped him off or looked at him crosseyed. Or maybe the guy was just deranged, and smashed her window for no reason at all.

Really, it could be that no one at all knows what happened. Maybe the lady in the car has no idea what brought this on, maybe the homeless guy has forgotten about it by now, and as for the rest of us who saw it, we have even less idea than those two. Furthermore, we haven't got the slightest idea what's going to happen next; even if the lady finds a policeman and reports the incident, can you imagine trying to find one homeless guy out of thousands in downtown Los Angeles? Particularly after an emotional shock?

It's like the whole scene fell into the world from somewhere else. I wonder how many other such things fall on us every day. I'm not sure whether to be unnerved or fascinated.

Benshlomo says, The world is a broken mirror.