One occupational hazard of a career in journalism is the illusion that what you do has any lasting impact in the larger scheme of things. That rarely happens, but on certain occasions you do get the chance to make a difference in one person’s life.
Thirty years ago, I was in my office at Mother Jones early one morning when the front desk buzzed me to say there was someone who would like to talk to an editor. It was the week following the Rodney King beating by police in L.A. and there had been destructive riots with looting in San Francisco’s downtown areas.
My visitor was a soft-spoken young man carrying a large package. He asked me if we could speak privately.
Back in my office, he explained the purpose of his visit. He’d been caught up in the anger of the moment, he said, and had been angry and frustrated by yet another act of police violence against his community — he’d grown up in South Central L.A. -- when he had joined the rioters and broken into a Radio Shack and stolen a computer monitor.
“I knew it was wrong almost the minute I did it, and now I feel bad,” he told me. “I’d like to ask if you’d return it for me.”
I looked closely at my young visitor. He was black, perhaps 21 years old or so, with the kind of honest face you can’t fake. I really wanted to know more of his story.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I will return it for you if you’ll tell me why you stole it in the first place and what you wanted it for.”
He accepted these terms and we further agreed that I would protect his identity in any article that I published based on our conversation.
His story proved to be exceptionally timely. He described growing up in poverty, surrounded by violence and family tragedy but told me how he had avoided getting into major trouble himself, partly due to his love of music. His dream was to to make music of his own and he had grabbed the monitor in the mistaken belief it was a computer that could help him do that.
Later on I arranged for the monitor to be returned to Radio Shack, which eventually led to a call from the D.A.’s office asking me to identify my young informant so he could be charged for a crime.
I flatly refused and asked, “How many of the hundreds of rioters that looted have turned the stuff they stole back in?”
“He’s the only one.”
I then suggested it might send a mixed message at a time of heightened racial tensions to prosecute the one guy out of hundreds willing to try and make amends. Besides, I doubted any jury would convict him of anything anyway.
That was the last I heard from the D.A., but a friendly editor over at the San Francisco Examiner spotted my piece in Mother Jones and asked to reprint it.
That set off a completely unanticipated seres of events, including a flood of donations from the public to help my young friend buy a real computer, which in turn helped him make his dreams of becoming a musician come true.
So that’s the ending to this particular story. But you know that where one ends, often another begins.
That’s what happened in this case, but that story is not mine to tell.
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Today’s Lyrics
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or over-step the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying
It's the last temptation
The last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be another day
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away —Bob Dylan
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