But for the Grace of God

On the day that Glenn Beck and his horde of infantile angry white men converged by the Lincoln Memorial to "restore the honor" of America, I was carrying a woman with a broken hip into a friend's car. She'd been evicted from the hospital earlier in the week, after her Medicare coverage ran out: they gave her a walker, put her in a cab, paid the fare, and sent her back to the third story apartment she shares with her very-literally-deranged daughter. When she got out of the car, someone stole her walker, and she waited at the curb until some guys who lived in her apartment building carried her up the three flights of stairs and set her down on her olive green sofa, where she stayed till we heard from her a few days later because she was hungry. It had taken her this long to get the phone from her daughter, who shouted in the background of the phone call, "Don't talk to them about how I treat you!"

So we went over with some groceries, and in the end, decided to carry her out and return her to the hospital.

The feeling of a 72-year-old, 87-pound woman clinging to my neck and crying in pain is outside my normal range of experience and I won't forget it any time soon. While I carried her, I worried I'd drop her, of course; but I also worried that from her pain she'd vomit on my new shirt. The thoughts that pop into one's head are sometimes an unpleasant surprise.

"Thank you," she said.

"You don't have to thank me."

This isn't a story about me or any good deed of mine: I was, in this, just an orderly, and an accidental one who just happened to be nearby. My friends are saints: they stock her fridge, and they decided to cover the cost of re-admitting the woman to the hospital. (In the end, this wound up being a daily copay, only: the woman was thrown out, broken hip and all, because she couldn't pay $100 a day...)

After we got the woman into the car, my friend drove off to the hospital, and I—still with the old woman's smell on me—walked off through Hollywood. Very few people walk in Hollywood: sometimes it feels like I and homeless people are the only ones who walk in Hollywood. I walked by a man with no shirt and a white, chest-length beard. His hands looked like they'd been tarred. He curled one of them into a fist and he shook it weakly at the sky. His lips moved but he didn't make any sound.

This, at the corner of Selma and Ivar, the spot where tomorrow morning there will be a luxe farmer's market selling handmade soaps and organic produce, but where today a man with tarry hands lives out of a shopping cart and curses God, and a woman with a broken hip pisses in her sofa for days because she can't cover a $100 copay; and I just broke, right there, shaking, with the disparity of so much privilege—a Siddhartha moment: the suffering of people is so real sometimes it pervades right through all the creature comforts we erect to shield ourselves from it. "You don't have to thank me," I'd told her, not to be polite, but because the world owes her some kindness. This same day that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin marched on Washington to "restore traditional values" to America—the traditional values that led to slavery and segregation, the values that led to rail barons and child labor, the values that espouse neglect of the disenfranchised, abandonment of the helpless, enrichment of the coddled—values that in wiser times of history are, once adopted by the state, called fascism; and any society that willfully chooses not to take care of its own doesn't deserve to be called a society at all.