Jane Jacobs, sweetheart & city planning theorist extraordinaire, writes such delightful things in The Death & Life of Great American Cities.

For example, she saith on page 73:

In speaking about city sidewalk safety, I mentioned how necessary it is that there should be, . . . an almost unconcsious assumption of general street support when the chips are down—when a citizen has to choose, for instance, whether he will take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combating barbarism or protecting strangers.

The potential for a street life, the casual and unexpected interaction of strangers on the street, to the full (or at least partial!) extent of our humanity—this common shared experience with my brethren and sistren—that is why I choose to live in cities. The unquieted life of humans in real public contact: it's a sweetness to be had. And I intend to do my bit, by being active, rather than shy, in the public arena.

Now, in the excellent non-fiction book, Praying For Sheetrock, journalist Mellisa Fay Greene describes a scene in a Southern town in the 1960s, at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement, when a black woman is having a loud argument with her (black) boyfriend, who has had a couple of drinks, in the front yard of her small house. A (white) cop overhears a good portion of the argument and goes to intervene. To gain some lattitude, he puts his gun in the face of the boyfriend and gives him some brusque orders, which he (the boyfriend) refuses to follow, and in fact he becomes belligerent in the face of this police audacity (one stroke out of centuries of destructive race-relations in this town). Because the man is not doing what the policeman asked him to do, the policeman does what he is trained to do: he pulls the trigger, putting a bullet in the face of the argumentative boyfriend, who is rushed to the hospital and out of site. Then follows a remarkable scene of mobilization amongst the county's black citizens, which is worth reading, amongst other things, for the sheer suspense of it.

A few weeks ago I walked past a walkup apartment where a man, five steps above street level, was yelling insistently at a woman, who was inside: "Open the door, right now. Open the damn door. Open the fucking door right now!" Peeking out through the glass pane, pushing the curtain aside, she was protesting with a modicum of calm but I couldn't hear her words. The event struck me rudely, as I was having a blissful stroll home on this Sunday afternoon. My placidity disturbed, I had a mind to give the man what-for.

Should I have?

It may or may not affect your judgement to know that the man outside the apartment, and the woman inside, were black.

I could here him yelling from the next block.