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    About the Gesture

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    This was before the pandemic, when getting on through the back was frowned upon. These two teens tumbled aboard through the middle doors anyway, a rough’n’ready young couple jumping in at Rainier and Othello.

    The boyfriend was already stalking toward the back, casting about for his favorite seat. She was also African-American, with tight jeans and an athletic sweatshirt, her hair in long, tight multicolored braids. She looked at me through the mirror and paused.

    “Could we have a ride?” she called out to me. 

    They were already onboard. Of course I was going to say yes– but that’s exactly why I was so touched by her question.     She knew she didn’t have to ask. The only reason to do say anything at this point was out of respect. And it was important to her to offer the gesture. I assume she knew me from previous rides in the general sense, as a genial part of the neighborhood, the person who won’t give you trouble and whom you get to saying hello to.

    “For sure, thanks for asking!” I replied.

    At the end of their ride, I looked up as I prepared to open the doors for them. Usually it’s me who calls ‘thank you,’ preemptively, and I get excited when I get any kind of reaction. Especially from the kids. 

    But these two.

    She spoke first. “Thank you,” she called out, turning toward me as the bus slowed to a stop. Then she added, “Thank you for driving late at night!”

    Who’s gonna tell me no youngsters care? Who’s gonna try to convince me there’s no one out here who puts themselves in another’s shoes? 

    Magic happens. We have to recognize it when we see it, and hang on to it. Put it in your pocket for later, as a reminder during more frustrated times:

    There are some great attitudes out there.
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    Friends and Strangers and Friends

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    The first guy didn't pay, but talked. “How's it going,” I asked. 
    “Fine, how are you,” he said.
    “Really good!”
    The second guy, behind him, paid but didn't speak. Some might prefer the latter customer. You know which I preferred! Later the first fellow came forward, being now the only passenger remaining.

    “How's your day?” I asked again. I’ve discovered you can ask this question in paraphrase more than once without anyone noticing.
    “Good,” he replied. “Ups and downs.”
    “Ups are good.”
    “Yeah. And the downs, we just have to be patient.”

    There was a wisdom in the observation I’d expect from someone at least slightly older. I looked like him in age, which given my babyface appearance meant: he’s younger than me. A college-age man in a leather jacket and scuffed black jeans.

    “Yeah, the ups will come back around,” I agreed.
    “How about you?”
    “Really good, yeah.”
    “Man," he said, looking around in amazement. "Why is this bus so dirty?!?”

    I chuckled. Various articles of garbage– food wrappers, beer cans, scraps of paper– nodded back and forth on the floors as we drove along. The 7 crowd is known for adding character, not cleanliness. 

    “I know, it's kind of crazy! It's been out all day. Someone else drove it this morning, then another person, then I got it for the night shift.”
    “You drive at night?”
    “Yeah. Until... I'll be off in half an hour.”
    “That's good. It's a good time to drive actually, no traffic–”
    “Yeah, I love it.” 
    “And what about the people, they're friends?”

    I didn't have time to answer, at least not in words. But inwardly I appreciated the common language of his supportive optimism, and looking at the next zone marveled at the timing. “Hang on, I gotta pick up my friend here,” I said, pulling in. I called out to the person waiting: “Hey, Jot!” 
    “Hey!” she said in a sprightly voice. “I'm sorry if I smell like food!”
    “Oh that's fine! Food smells good!”

    Like me, Jot also worked evenings, and sympathized with my common schedule. She's a dear. In those days she was on my bus regularly; always the ready grin and hyperactive mind, hair done up just so– a braid today, artful frizz tomorrow– and confidently worn outfits too flattering to describe here. Tonight she’d brought me ice cream. She was only on for a few stops, but you know how a thing like that can send a buzz up your spine, a spiraling wave of joy you ride for the rest of the evening?

    He asked her, “aren’t you cold?” and she said no, from working in the restaurant all day. A budding pleasantness was spreading. I opened the doors to Will. There are lot of great Wills in bus-driving land; this one’s the street fellow with the cane and uneven gait, who always has a good word for me.

    “Hey Will,” I said, explaining that I was a short 49 with a different destination. He opted to wait for the next bus, and I bid him farewell. 
    “Thanks man!" He called out as I closed the doors. Jot stepped out; a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Those pre-coronavirus days.

    “Man, people like you!” our leather-jacketed friend observed.
    “Sometimes! I've been knowing her for a long time, she's cool.”
    “You have good energy.”
    “Thanks man.”
    He had more to say. “No I'm serious, bro. You have, you have the real stuff. Real good energy. You're not just faking it. I can tell.” 
    “I'm glad it comes across as genuine!” 
    “Oh of course. ‘Cause you can always tell when people are faking it. Even with that homeless guy, you knew his name, the way you talked to him... Good energy, bro. That's special. Man, aren't you cold? She wasn't cold either. Maybe I'm just…”
    “And you got a coat on, too!”
    “I'm from Africa. I've been here one year.”
    “Oh, cool! Welcome to Seattle, I'm glad it's worked out for a year. Where in Africa, Morocco?”
    “Tunisia, right next to Morocco.”
    “Cool, man. I have a friend who's married to a man from Tunisia. She's white, he's from Tunisia.”

    He paused, staring. Then thinking, then exploding with a huge smile: “Celia!”
    We were both detonating now– “Yes! What? No way! Yeah, Celia and Amin!”
    “Dude, I knew you would– something about your energy, man, of course! Yeah, this is a picture– I'll wait until you get to a red light. Yeah, this is Celia and Amin in my house!”

    I couldn’t believe it. Celia, a regular face from forever ago in the stories below.
    “That's amazing! That's right, they just visited over there. Celia's so cool. I've known her for many years.”
    “Yeah she is. Amin I've known for seven years, we lived in the same area together.”
    “This is crazy! This is crazy! What's your name!?”
    “Ravi.”
    “I'm Nathan.”

    We went on like that, living in the glow of goodness and comfort. "Small worlds" make us feel larger, richer, more appropriately entwined in this web of life we spend so much time in; they make us less lonely. Perhaps it’s indulgent of me to share this delightful friend bomb; but I know you know just as many amiable faces, and that it’s equally delightful when worlds we thought unrelated surprise us in their joyful collision. Among my favorite things is catching– trying to catch– the shape of joy as it exists out there, running across the unexpected intersections of goodwill you've built without thinking. 

    Did I know he was my good friend’s husband’s best friend? I could never have guessed. Did he know I was his friend’s wife’s good friend, connections involving cities and homes and journeys thousands of miles apart? Good thing we were both the chatty type, or neither of us would ever have been the wiser. Good thing we were both kind.

    You never quite know whom you’re talking to.

    ---

    More with Celia:
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    Nathan Converses With His Colleagues: VII

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    We were in that special place following the conclusion of a night shift– and by place I mean both physical and psychological. Physical, because walking into the base in those wee hours is a different experience– a beacon of spacious brightness, unusual following everything you've just experienced, like a temple in the woods; and psychological, because only the people there at that hour can relate to your experience. Only they know what night shift involves, sounds like, feels like. Things are normal to you that aren't for others, funny for you but not for the rest, wanted or seen by only you. I enjoy strolling back into this common space.

    "Mr. Vass!" yelled Thomas, like me exhausted but happy. I'd waved at him on the street earlier, and now was our chance to talk.
    "We meet at last! Did you have a fine evening on the 70?"

    I love how Thomas matches my slightly (should that be very?) ridiculous turns of phrase. I can never tell how serious he's being, but I know exchanging such Victorian volleys always brings us both up. He called out in reply, "It was a wonderful, beautiful, inspirational evening, plenty of people familiar with Christianity enjoying their Easter–"
    "Oh, that's right!"
    "And somebody even left me this beautiful phone!"
    "Gosh, look at that beast! That puts this… to shame!" I pulled out my phone by comparison– 2014’s woefully underpowered Samsung ZTE Zinger, barely four inches and archaic from the day of its release, the world's tiniest, sorriest excuse for a smartphone. I’m always behind on gadgets.

    "HA!" We destroyed the building with our laughter. The place was in ruins. We cackled it to dust. 
    Through his guffaws he said, "Is that your phone?"
    "It is!"
    "You don't– that's what I like about you, Nathan–"
    "I like to keep it low key!"
    "I wanna be you when I grow up! Like, when I'm like eighty years old, like, the only thing I want is like a cone with some string strung to it, and if like you can't find the can on the other side to talk to me–"
    "We're not havin' a conversation!"
    "–we have nothin' to talk about anyway! Yeah, I just want to get simplified.. hey, what'd you think of that protest?"
    "You know, I… missed it! I started after it ended." 
    "Awwwww…"
    "How was it?"
    "You know, it was, it was very, uh… It allowed me to break out my qualities of patience and understanding…"
    I grinned. "An excellent character-building afternoon?"
    "It was wonderful. It was special."
    "It always is."

    We were fatigued and sore, but we weren't concerned. We'd sat in traffic for eight hours and picked up unhappy people. 

    Whatever, man. 

    It's all about how you choose to look at things.

    --

    Nathan Converses With His Colleagues: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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    The Good Neighbor

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    I won’t mention the many issues I take with this awful coworker of mine. I’ll merely point out his obliviousness of how to skip-stop, the better to illustrate what happened: I was southbound at Rainier and Holden, nearing the end of the 7 route, and he was right behind me. When two buses of the same route have the same destination and have caught up with each other, the first bus should skip the stops it can, so the second bus can share some of the load. This speeds up both buses. A passenger was waiting at the Holden stop, but I barreled past, gesturing at the second bus behind me.

    Except he didn’t stop. 

    Fifteen-odd minutes later, I recognized that passenger again as he came running toward my bus, now parked at the Henderson terminal. I couldn’t help but feel apprehensive. Was he angry? I bet he was. He had to be. I stepped toward him, opening the doors and trying to quickly prepare how best to explain skip-stopping and that I had trusted the bus behind me to follow the rules and pick him up.

    He was a dark-skinned middle-aged man dressed in white, a crisp and massive spotless sweatshirt and matching beret. From behind wire-frame spectacles he listened as I did my best, gesturing about the bus behind me and apologizing that that guy didn’t do as I’d hoped.

    He wasn’t mad. “Yeah, I know,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief.

    He explained he was holding a Lost and Found item, one he had come upon and believed belonged to a passenger from my bus. He was attempting to return it and thought I should have it because it looked important. He had boarded a third bus a few minutes later, ran up to my follower at the terminal and gotten chewed out by him, and subsequently ran up to my bus, just before I was to leave.

    I apologized to him, telling him he was a good man, offering my hand to shake. He took it. “I thought you just wanted to get down the street,” I said. “Thank you so much for comin’ over here, goin’ outta your way like that. I didn’t know.” I took the item, a folder with documents. They did look important. “Man, somebody is gonna love you!”

    He chuckled and strolled off. I spent my next trip newly energized by him, a man who’d taken at least thirty minutes of his own time to help someone he’d never meet, for no reward, and who didn’t give up when strife was thrown in his face along the journey. His gentle gait as he ambled toward the setting sun spoke his worldview as plainly as anything else: 

    It feels good to do the right thing.
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    The United States of Floyd

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    Before we talk about George Floyd, we have to talk about Eric Garner. Taking a step back deepens the picture.

    1. The Landscape

    On July 16, 2019, I walked into a coffee shop at 2nd and Lenora. The New York Times headline inside caught my eye because it mentioned Garner’s name, whom I’d written about in the days following his murder in 2014. Five years later, this headline read, “Eric Garner’s Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for N.Y.P.D. Officer.” 

    I paused.

    For me, the Garner tragedy represented the quintessential contemporary example of the American Problem. Why?

    Perhaps a better symbol is the prison system and the legalized slavery it perpetuates. I was as shocked as anyone else to learn about how black men were rebranded as dangerous, more than merely dense, in the days following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the better to justify their arrest (the 13th amendment prohibits slavery– except among prisoners). “Reconstruction” indeed. Or that our government made widespread, calculated efforts to link blacks and drug use in the public consciousness during the Vietnam era (more by me on all of that here).

    These are broad-ranging attempts at subjugation undertaken by the highest institutions in the land and they are infinitely complex, often too pervasive to see clearly. They’re ineffective as symbols.

    2. What Eric Garner Means 

    The Garner murder, conversely, coalesces all these oppressive systems into one succinct moment. Four hundred years of inequality, fear and hatred are wrapped up in a few seconds, and as of the July 16, 2019 Supreme Court announcement, we can sit with the truth of the American state of things. Here, an armed white man can kill an unarmed black man who's crying for help, be recorded on camera, and be legally untouchable.

    I first wrote about Garner here, offering some hopeful words on what we can do now, how we can look at others. I noted what the folks on my (largely black) bus were saying after Michael Brown– that cops have a tough job. That there's more than one side to every story. That Black Lives Matter protesters are always white, and that's okay, because we've got other obligations keeping us down. That we've gotta keep on keepin' on. I was struck by their optimism.

    Of course there are countless unjust murders of poor blacks by whites in power. But as I stood there in the coffee shop, dumbstruck by the acquittal announcement, I wondered: Do those murders mean less? Or more? How has the Court's decision further solidified our understanding of the state of prejudice in America? To what degree will it help people recognize this is not a problem of individuals but something bigger, the insidious "System" so eloquently articulated in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, of institutional and unchecked government corruption not simply at the local level but every level?

    3. Dark Night of the Soul

    I looked at the front page and realized I was sobbing in public. It wasn't the picture of Garner's daughter on the steps of the Supreme Court, as you might assume. It wasn't the right-side column about Trump being denounced by the House as racist. It was the Garner article not mentioning the reason for the dropped charges until the end of the article. You had to turn the pages and find it buried.

    As if it wasn't important. 

    It was the reminder, which I'm ashamed to say I sometimes need, that black people are told they are dirt by all levels of society, all the time. Try to imagine it, my white friends, and consider how it might influence your perspective. It's not the same as getting bullied or mistreated by this man or that company. It's the highest, most respected institutions together colluding to reinforce your suppression and limit your rights. How might you begin to think about the world? About yourself? (More on that at the bottom of this post.)

    Can't keep the black man down, a song says. How quaint. Keeping the black man down is what the American societal infrastructure is all too adept at. Keeping them poor and therefore limited in the chess moves they can make; uneducated, and therefore unaware of the progress they can instigate; demonized, and therefore unattractive to others searching for solidarity. 

    I wept because I knew how my black friends would read the headline. This was an article whose informed takeaway was, Choking a defenseless black man to death in broad daylight is legal. A strange, sick feeling came over me: the impossible has happened. 

    They managed to kill a man twice.

    5. What I Do Love About America

    The most appropriate and the most inappropriate word for this travesty– Garner, Floyd, Brown and others– appear to be the same: Unamerican.

    Appropriate, because the values this country is based on emphasize personal freedoms and exist in complete opposition to such a denial of the right to life.

    Inappropriate, because America has for so long involved an unspoken problem such that all aspects of American Society are now best understood as they relate to the "peculiar institution." Our government's ongoing decision to ignore the legacy of slavery has come to define what America is: a contradiction at best, a hypocrisy at worst. No, there is only one adjective for this problem: 

    American.

    I write this as someone who loves the idea of America and loves living in it. I am fully aware how much infinitely better life is here, at all class levels, than so many other places. The best evidence for this is the tenacity with which so many people give up their lives to start over here at great cost. 

    Only here will you find overweight homeless people. Here is where you come so you can speak your mind, pray, wear your hair down, be single, marry as you choose, get a trial, be allowed an education as a woman, vote, drive, divorce, access information, get around though disabled, not have to enlist, speak any language you like (there's no official one), have access to the best passport in the world, and, of course, chew gum. Some countries don't allow you to buy a house, defend yourself, or go outside alone. Some countries consider domestic violence legal. I love this country. It's the only one whose founding concept incorporates the mutable and evolving nature of the human organism. Were it that our founding fathers were alive to remind us, as they already once did, that their documents need to be updated with the same tenacity.

    6. Life in the 21st Century

    There were no riots on July 16, 2019. I was amazed. Any previous generation would’ve taken to the streets with helpless rage and fire. Isn’t violence the one voice always available to the oppressed?

    No, actually. Not anymore. 

    People are quiet now. The word has gotten out, and I don't have to ask them why. I looked around at my fellow coffee shop customers. These are the youths who should be just as angry as those protesters of old. But we knew our place now. We knew we couldn't protest. Why?

    Because modern life carries too great a risk. Societal infrastructure has shifted, such that protesting gets you into trouble in a way it never used to. Life is costlier now, and freedom much easier to lose. You can't afford to get arrested now. To fix a broken limb. The defining aspects of material success in the Twentieth century– getting married, buying a house, starting a business, raising children– these are all much harder to do now, and far more expensive. In the 1960s, a waitress job would support a single mother and her child. That's impossible today. You can't buy land anymore. You can't get an apartment with an felony record. Or trust you can get another good job after being fired from this one. The class of people who would protest can no longer guarantee the security of their place as citizens in society.

    Violence is no longer the voice of the oppressed. Survival is the voice of the oppressed, except survival is silent. It isn't a voice. But it's how we get by.

    Complicating all this is the emerging truth that systems are too corrupt for protests to accomplish much. No better example exists than the 2017 Women's March (my thoughts on being in it here), the first global protest since the invention of the internet and therefore the largest in history. It was the first time 5 million people did the same thing at the same time, and no meaningful change came of it. (Now, if that many people had voted...)

    7. With Blood and Fire

    Which brings us to Mr. Floyd. 

    In this new culture which has tried to suppress protesting by limiting the rights and futures of those who do so; which has attempted to normalize brutality against black men, by way of the court acquittal above and elsewhere; which is set upon by the twin blights and enormous distractions of terrible leadership and a killer virus; in the new contemporary urban culture of docility and retreat from conflict for worse or better…

    Even in this environment, under these circumstances, people have shown they still care. They have passionately expressed themselves with the primordial, elemental tool of violent force. What does their unchecked fury reveal?

    I would argue it proves real their innate hunger for fairness.

    It unmasks a long-thwarted but unstoppable boiling desire for balance in the serving and order of things. In their violence, yes, innocents will be destroyed, fears stoked and flamed, wrongs made worse before they are better… but theirs is a thirst for justice. 

    And while justice may not exist in nature, it most certainly lives in the human soul. We disagree on what it is, but we all believe in each our own ideas, and we lean toward our definitions of goodness. I believe humans are basically good, and I believe the explosive outpouring happening now paradoxically proves that. 

    I would be crushed if there was no response to this society we live in now. Devastated. I had begun to assume that people cared, but didn’t say so out of fear; that they felt shackled by the physical and institutional dangers of taking to the streets, and thusly that protesting was a thing of the past. I am glad to be wrong. The chaos in the streets is most definitely called for. I don’t condone it because I don’t condone violent action, especially political violence, which too often harms uninvolved persons. I would call it misguided, even hypocritical. There is no dignity in lowering yourself from abused to abuser.

    But I also know it is not my place to decide what is condonable.

    8. The Boiling Point

    George Floyd, a kind man and upstanding citizen by all accounts, will now live forever, if perhaps not as he might have wished. If Mr. Garner’s death represents everything wrong with American race relations in a single gesture, then Mr. Floyd’s murder exemplifies everything wrong with contemporary society in a single gesture. This is about more than race. 

    Floyd dying is the catalyst for the anger of the masses, but not its origin point. The people are angry about all of it. Floyd forcefully reminds us what we’ve become accustomed to is wrong. 

    We have tolerated an unaddressed history of slavery, traditions of lynching, shooting, and humiliating black men, a system for perpetuating slavery by way of prisons, judicial and legislative action that targets persons of color in the areas of housing, crime and employment, unchecked abuses of power and misappropriation of taxpayer resources, a flawed election system, a casual disregard for women’s equality and safety, a vehement denial of women’s bodily rights and rights as workers, a hyperwealthy elite hoarding most of the world’s wealth, the resulting unchecked poverty, a backbiting political system locked in unceasing standstill, disruption and mistreatment of immigrants seeking asylum, separation of families and the rebirth of concentration camps, a newsmedia swallowed by editorial opinion, a woefully mishandled medical crisis, a president who encourages and normalizes prejudicial attitudes against most demographics, and an ignorant and uneducated populace who perpetuate such prejudices and others. 

    We tolerated all of those things until George Floyd forced our eyes open. He was the last straw on this towering heap of injustice, a heap we’ve been feeling all the more potently in these days of poorly checked pestilence and plague. There is a desire for good in our frenzied souls, and people don't know where to put their energy. How to express their passion. Society has diminished the language of kindness. Some of us have always spoken it, sure, but everyone else still carries the memory of principle.

    I find it almost touching, the way it's coming out, burping forth in formless savagery. You can take issue with the expression, but you can't blame the intent. Today's righteous chaos would be met with pride by the author of these lines:

    "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

    That's not from some anarchist's cookbook. That's the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Thomas Jefferson writes further in the same document: "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

    Justice does not exist in nature, but it lives in the human soul. And it cannot be eradicated.