Go back to Words & Wit pageSAN FRANCISCO -- "Now I understand Bosnia," I said to the growing clutter in my apartment. "Neighbors living side by side, for years, in harmony. Then, one day, everything changes, and your friends are mortal enemies."
I had been thinking about the ferocious hostility among my striking colleagues towards non-striking editors and managers -- people many of us have called "friend" for years.
Now we were calling them terrible names, some unprintable even in a strike newspaper.
The name-calling -- name-shouting, really -- started the very first night of the strike. It came easily to the lips of some of the most soft-spoken and decorum-minded people I know. It came easily to me, as instinctive as a song in the shower.
And that scared me.
I despise the mentality of Us Against Them. The belief that any issue is pristine, simple, black and white. That mentality leads to massacres in the name of deities, to hostage-taking, concentration camps and Sarajevo in ruins.
I've spent most of my adult life urging others to see the gray, forcing myself to try to understand when I most want to condemn. The only ground I want to fight for is common ground.
But a labor strike is quite a humbler for a "civilized" person. I am swimming in depths of anger and hostility I've never experienced. Such feelings seem to come with the territory.
And, while a strike is hardly an ethnic war, it is similar enough for me, an object lesson in how easy it is to talk about common ground and how hard that can be to do when the stakes are high and the provocation so deliberate. If nothing else, I now know why everyone who has ever been through a strike gets a haunted look and says, "Nothing is ever the same. No matter how it ends up."
A few nights ago, when the rain and wind were torturing the Bay Area, I walked into the canteen area of strike headquarters. A quiet and dignified Examiner editor was taking a break from the picket line. His silver hair was covered by a soaked stocking cap. His coat and pants and gloves were dripping, and he couldn't see because his glasses had fogged over. I handed the editor a dry napkin to clear his glasses, patted his water-soaked sleeve and felt my heart break as I watched him head back out into the gale. Then I went into the back room and cried for want of anything better to do.
The next day, a non-striking editor -- a friend -- phoned to see how I was doing. I mentioned the relentless rain. The editor chuckled and made a crack about how "enjoyable" it had been to sit inside the Examiner and watch all that rain come down.
The image of my silver-haired, soaking wet colleague filled my brain. I went white-hot with rage. The desire to wound, to do major and lasting damage to anybody or anything, was like a wave crashing over me.
Fortunately, this was a phone call, not a confrontation through a barbed-wire fence.
A few days later, flipping through a book of proverbs, I found this one from Malaysia: "Anger has no eyes."
No kidding, I thought. And no ears, no patience, no appetite for reason, no civil tongue and no affinity for the color gray.
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