Lost on the wrong side of town

EDIT: Notice again the date... and sorry again for posting late!

Last night, Curtis and I went to a USC football game. One of the members of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, a USC alum and former collegiate national champion in mens' tennis who never lost a match in 3 seasons of play (many years ago), was nice enough to give us two tickets in the fifth row on the home side at the 15 yard line. So Will gave us a ride down to the stadium two hours before kick-off so we could get the full USC home game experience (we were fortunate enough to meet some very hospitable tailgaters... but they drew the line at listening to two boys from the south try to tell them that SEC teams play the toughest schedules in college football). Once inside the stadium, after we got past the initial ooh-ing and aah-ing at the up-close-and-personal perspective on SC's tradition and pageantry, the game itself was incredibly boring. The Trojans defeated the Washington State Cougars 27-6 in a game that seemed devoid of much passion or intensity (and scoring, too, during the second, third and much of the fourth quarters).

After the game, however, is when things got interesting (well, at least interesting enough for me to write a blog entry about it). Curtis and I had planned to take the LA city bus home (as mentioned above, Will dropped us off before the game using our shared community mini-van; our thinking was to avoid paying for parking and dealing with saturday-late-night, post-game LA traffic). Problem was, by 10:30, when we finally got out of the stadium, the city buses had seemed to have stopped running. We waited at the closest bus stop to the stadium before noticing a small sign with a bus schedule that indicated that this particular bus only ran until 9pm on Saturdays. So using Curtis' iPhone, we looked up a route of another bus that would take us home (that supposedly came more frequently/ran later) a few blocks to the west of the stadium.

We arrived at our new bus stop a little before 11pm. We waited. And waited. As we watched a group of men drinking and loitering across the street (who seemed to be watching us), we started feeling more and more out of place as two white guys in USC gear late Saturday night on a corner in what we learned the following morning to be the edge of South Central Los Angeles. We met a woman who seemed to be from the neighborhood (she knew quite a few of the people milling about) who asked us for a dollar so she could buy another beer from the gas station across the street. After making conversation with her for awhile with no sign of the buses, we called a taxi company. When we told the person from the taxi company on the phone where we were, the intersection King and Normandie, he informed us that their company "doesn't pick up there."

A few minutes later, a young man in his late 20s/early 30s approached and asked if we knew if the buses were still running. We were trying to figure out the same thing, we told him.

The young man's name was Cesar. He told us he was recently released from prison and "didn't want to get in trouble again." He was trying to get home (from... where? We never asked.) and was nervous about the possibility of having to keep walking through this particular neighborhood. LA is notorious for gang violence that tends to fall along racial lines, and as a young, Hispanic male, Cesar (like us) was obviously out of place in South Central, a predominantly African American area.

By this point Curtis and I had each said plenty of quick, silent prayers that God would help us get home. I was almost to the point of calling one of our roommates to come pick us up (who would then have to figure out how to get to where we were and drive there at night after living in LA for all of 3 weeks) when we saw a taxi pull into the gas station across the street. Cesar suggested we go see if the driver could take us all back (Cesar's house was on the way to our neighborhood). We negotiated a fare before we got into the cab (like I would always do in Lima, where there are no taximeters, even though this guy had one). He agreed to take us for a very reasonable price, so all three of us squeezed into the back seat, and 30 minutes later, we were home.

And that's pretty much the end of the story. The taxi dropped Cesar off first, and then took Curtis and I back home, safe and sound. The driver was a college-educated immigrant from Ethiopia. Because of health problems, he was driving a taxi instead of continuing with school/professional work. We thanked him and wished him good luck.

Although it was maybe anti-climatic, Curtis' and my late-night experience in South Central offers plenty of things to over-analyze. In telling the story to our housemates and members of First Pres Hollywood afterwards, we both said we were scared. We were scared because we were "lost" on the "wrong" side of town. I still don't know how reasonable/justified our feelings of fear were. Maybe the feelings were products of our common sense/self-preservation instinctively trying to keep us safe and preventing us from acting unwisely. Or maybe they were products of having seen too many movies, listened to too many rap songs and heard too many rumors about that particular area of LA.

Although it has an important biological function, fear can sometimes be a bad thing. In the Bible, God is frequently telling folks to relax and "be not afraid." Fear can make us act violently and hatefully. Fear is probably the number one reason why most of us don't really pay too much attention when Jesus tells us to "love our enemies." Fear is why a lot of kids join gangs. Fear is why we build walls between us and them, and also why we steer clear of certain "wrong" sides of town.

The reason I would refer to South Central as the "wrong" side of town for guys like me and Curtis has a little to do with race and a lot to do with money and power. I've said it before (almost exactly a year ago, as a matter of fact) and I'll say it again: if you don't have money or power, you have very little reason to be afraid in the inner city. Not coincidentally, that's what this year of dwelling in the inner city is about. Freeing ourselves from enslavement to worldly money and power. Coming face to face with people that are different than us and that sometimes scare us. As Shane Claiborne says, while our society encourages upward mobility and a race to the top to become the richest and greatest, Jesus invites his followers to do the opposite: to enter into a movement of downward mobility, a "race to the bottom" to become like and to serve "the least of these." It's not easy, and for a North American, white, heterosexual, middle-upper class male, who's about as close to "the top" as you can get, it's a long, long race, and it's gonna be pretty scary. But that's when God finds us on the right side of town.

Note: as a community, we (the Dwellers) are currently reading Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution, which is the reason why I sound so much bolder/more idealistic/provocative than usual (or maybe not?)