Predators Among the Walking Clueless

She turned in an assignment.

I had told her what to do, and she did it — with flourish.

Now I had a lesson that educators don't often have to deal with. I had come upon a teaching moment so enormous, such a wave crashing on the shore that I was feeling the enormity of the sea about to bury me.

I was numb, groping on my hands and knees across the floor of my mind.

Before me was an image that was beyond provocative. It was sexuality so pointed, so calculated in its choice of colors, body positioning, textures of skin surface and angle that it was a dagger.

And it found its home. I was pinned against the wall, eyes wide, hands flailing, legs unable to help me. For I'd walked right into the trap — bondage to a sexual encounter that was bigger than me, bigger than a mere picture.

The assignment had been for my students, under the premise of John Stewart Mill's arguments about freedom (and his opposition of censorship) to find an example of some type of media expression — a word, a phrase, an article, a photograph, a video clip, an entire package of media — that went too far. Freedom is a buzz word in our country. But we have no idea what it really means, particularly in a world where the foundations of morality are eroding under our feet.

The point I wanted to make was that in this world there are messages so sinister, so damaging, so explosive that they deserve some degree of separation from unsuspecting audiences. Some messages are just too much — a category of media, perhaps even of truth-telling, that deserve control — censorship, if that word can be used in any positive sense.

This student had done her research.

She found an advertisement — two, actually by the same advertising agency — promoting a perfume. And as is the case with most advertisements that have done effective market study, that have a firm grasp of socio-cultural, psycho-social needs in a given audience, this was not about fragrance.

This was an example of what the U.S. Supreme Court, as you'll see in this article by Judith A. Silver, would call obscenity — pornography, actually — under the guise of product advertisement. (The problem, of course, coming down to our acceptance of community standards for what is obscene. We lack community; we lack a sense of what obscene really is.)

Movie Day at the Supreme Court or "I Know It When I See It": A History of the Definition of Obscenity

I'd forgotten how pernicious pornography could be. I'd forgotten how it reaches into the mind, the body, the very soul of a man and grips him in ways that are a force beyond human reasoning.

The Bible doesn't deal with pornography as such. Marshall McLuhan would say pornography is media. But the grip of pornography is not what appears on a page, or in moving images, or in still-frame images. It's so much more.

The stuff we saw first in Hugh Hefner's magazine, but which is now an international industry of proportions none of us really grasp, is an invitation to fantasy. It is, in its own way, Art. Larry Flynt once told National Public Radio interviewer Terry Gross that Hustler magazine was a celebration of women — a tribute to their beauty, to their place in what, in his world, was a high culture of sexual expression, a beauty of unrestrained erotic ecstasy. But what Larry Flynt was describing was an Art of darkness.

What Larry Flynt didn't say, and that no pornographer will admit — except as an aside in an argument to persuade hapless postmoderns — is that the essence of pornography is bondage to a world of fantasy expectations regarding the relationship of a man to a woman. At its best, it is a room with an entrance but no exit.

And the dirty little secret is that there's no there there. Once you're inside, you're part of a vast emptiness, one you can't get enough of.

The look of pleasure on the faces of those women and men in those pictures, the groaning and murmuring of the women and men in those videos. All of it is fiction. Those women, those men — all of them — are actors. Some actually care (existentially) about what they're depicting; most probably don't. They're in a staged moment: lights, make-up, the works. They drive to the set; they drive home. They're people with a soul, with a mind, with a heart hungry for real relationship. Many of them are deeply lonely.

Sex is not all there is. Passion has an end. After every night of orgy and abandon to the flailing, breathless pleasures in the dark, there is a morning after.

The sun also rises.

The good news for us who know the forgiveness in Christ is that when we see that sun, we know the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies, we know, never come to an end. They are new every morning. And his faithfulness is there. But so is judgment.

A price of pornography addiction (even of dipping our toes in the edges of its vast oceanic expanse) is what it does to our eyes, our expectations of relationship, of interaction with women and men (even, oh Lord help us, children) around us — real and on billboards, on pages, in film.

We who inhabit Christian evangelical culture cannot deceive ourselves into thinking that as believers in Christ we can dabble in the fantasies of the mind and media that are destroying the moral foundation of Western civilization.

It must be pointed out that destruction we see around us is not random. It is not just circumstantial devolution. It's the outcome of predatory behavior. It is the result of systematic attack on us by is an enemy who knows us — knows our sexuality, grasps who we think we are better than we do. And this enemy uses media to lure us into the dark, empty box with no door.

None of this is really new. He's been destroying civilizations with it for centuries. Babylon, Greece, Rome, the tribes and peoples of Europe and South America and Asia — all of them wrestled with the concepts inherent in pornographic bondage of our day.

Pornography hurts women, it hurts men, it hurts children.

Biblical admonitions against what the enemy does through pornography can be seen in passages warning us against extramarital sexual encounter. Two of the more prominent are Proverbs 5: 15-23; Proverbs 7:6-27. They're warnings against foolish dabbling in sex outside marriage.

Then there are the warnings about image (pornography, after all, is about what we see even though it's spread to phone sex and cyber-sex and other means we create to connect with others electronically.) The Bible contains scores of warnings in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, and in the lives of David and Saul regarding the ways images draw people astray. And it's not just about idols.

God knows us. He points out the dangers of imagery because He knows our tendency to allow images to turn our attention away from the reality of God in the world — a reality bigger, more vast than any depiction the human mind, even in its God-breathed creativity, could ever form.

Now I have the hard task of helping my students understand that the edge of the volcano is not the best place to be — even if we think we know how to get back from the brink.

If they find themselves standing there at the edge, they should know they are foolish if they do either of the following.

First, they'd be foolish to think sexuality in media is either absent or innocent. Attacks on the male psyche are all around us, infecting every man — young or old, rich or poor — in our country and anywhere else that commercial forces are shaping media messages.

How easily we lapse into lethargy and complacence. How clueless we are about the spiritual warfare raging around us. Just because we leave our weapon at home or never learned how to use it doesn't mean there aren't bullets slamming into the dirt and buildings all around us. We act so shocked when get wounded. ("Why would anybody hurt me — I'm such a nice person?" we ask ourselves. Why? Because the enemy hates the work of God in us. Why hurt nice people? Because they're the easiest to take down.)

So secondly, we're foolish to think we can win all by ourselves. We can't.

This is a battle so much bigger than anything we can muster. We must take this to our knees, to our faces in the dust — to prayer that agrees with God that we are helpless against the monster.

Our mindset must be like the man in the gospel of Mark who threw himself before Jesus and screamed at the torment from which he thought he could never be free (Mark 5:1-15). The irony was that this man's bondage was so penetrating, so fearsome, that the very presence of Christ — the Holy One — created in him a fear, a pleading for the Lord to go away. Why do we do that? Something about intense pain makes us incoherent, unable to see hope. All we know is agony, and those who know our torment.

Jesus healed this man. Jesus freed him from bondage to the demons that drove him to gash himself and run from all who would restrain him, from any who tried to help.

So must we. The Savior of the world is our protector in this world of sexually predatory image-makers and images that lure us from the margins of our minds.

Hold On

The teaching of post-adolescents is a study in flexibility.

To really connect with them, you have to be ready for nearly anything — at any time.

You have to expect disappointment.

Set up a meeting with them, and they might or might not show up. Plan an event (during class, but especially outside class) and you can count on some not being able to be there — unless you impose severe academic penalties for absence.

Innovate, and you will find confusion (legitimate or feigned) and resistance.

The cooler and more insightful you make your assignments, very often the less cooperation you'll get. Sort of an inverse proportion of connection.

Schedule a guest speaker who has enormous renown in your academic discipline — a giant among her peers, someone doing you a huge favor for showing up without charging thousands of dollars — and students will ask if they have to show up. (A variation of "is this on the test?")

True, there are legitimate excuses. Some students really do work 2-3 jobs, commute an hour or more to get to campus, and carry enormous numbers of units each semester to get through their education fast. (Same tuition if you go slow as if you speed it up.)

But those are the exceptions. Many undergraduates in residential settings are doing college as part of a leisure experience. You don't want to know what they're so busy with that they can't do the work you're assigning.

Some — tragically some of the really bright ones — juts don't care (for a variety of reasons) and the more you try to get them to, the less they do.

There are ways to adapt.

You can reach into their lives and get so creative that you pull them out of their lethargy and turn the lights on. You bring a meat cleaver and an apple to class and chop it on the table up front. You make the teaching pertinent to daily life. You wear yourself out getting personal with each student to awaken their sense of want-to. Jaime Escalante did it in "Stand and Deliver." And he ended up on a stairwell face down with a heart attack. Nobody knew he was there. It wasn't on the test to know.

Or you can go the other way.

You can become Kingsfield in the now-ancient film "The Paper Chase." In that movie, about law school students, the prof at the center of the story cares nothing for the women and men seated in the big lecture hall before him.

When a student comes late to class or answers ineptly, he goes beyond not caring. He publicly disdains the student — as a warning.

A student known as Mr. Hart comes to class unprepared on Day 1. Kingsfield berates him first for not speakng up. Then he humiliates him for not knowing the facts of a case that was in the readings posted on bulletin boards around campus. Before opening his academic jaws, to turn to other students in the class, he holds up two hands. "This is a shroud," he says to the lecture hall. "A burial shroud. For Mr. Hart."

Later, he calls Mr. Hart down to the front of the class — right in front of his elevated podium.

"Mr. Hart, here is a dime. Go call your mother and tell her there is serious doubt as to your being able to successfully become a lawyer."

Kingsfield dares his students to measure up, but expects them to fail. Some will defy his expectations and breach the barricades — clawing to success just to spite him. But they will probably never win his approval. Nobody can. He represents the unreachable heights of academic achievement in the legal profession. It's a legendary arrogance.

But that movie was made in the 1970s — a time when the vestiges of the privilege-only system of American higher education was still part of the academic landscape. It has all but disappeared in an academic economy and online learning world where teaching must become more approachable and where professional privilege has been eclipsed by the encroachment of institutions, in the U.S. and overseas, that offer students what they need fast, cheap and in ways that accomodate their foibles.

Students still have to go to class, pass tests, turn in papers and projects that measure some standard of excellence. But the long-building questions about what makes for achievement have become larger. And there are fewer students to go around. Colleges and universities (and departments) want students — need them. They disdain them at their peril.

So we teach. We adapt. We persuade. We cajole.

And when those students don't show up or don't cooperate in group projects or innovative approaches to learning, we steel ourselves.

To really survive, we focus on the ones who showed up, who did more than we required, who stuck around after class to talk more about what we brought up in the session.

The temptation to stop caring is great.

Do coaches waste energy on the bench-warmers? (I was a bench-warmer.)

Student volition cannot be programmed.

Scripture says Jesus, at times, marveled at how slow his followers were to get it.

But He never gave up on the laggards — like Peter, like James and John, like those with whom He walked (probably very slowly) down the road to Emmaus. Talk about totally missing the point of an illustration.

Like our Lord, who likened it to the pursuit of sheep, we keep at it.

Because when we can't anymore, it will be time to find something else to do.

Anger has an edge in the United States. Maybe it has that same edge in other countries and their news media don't come forth with it like ours do.

But here, when a man gets angry, and he has access to firearms, violence happens in ways that alarm us in the spontaneous ferocity of what erupts.

Soldiers — unarmed, vulnerable men and women — were shot dead yesterday at close range by an officer whom they were told to trust. The shooter, if he indeed acted alone, was a psychiatrist.

What we don't know on this Friday is whether that doctor had the capability of firing the 40-some rounds that apparently were spent that early Thursday afternoon. Were some of the dead or injured in cross-fire in what became a gun battle?

In Florida, the next day, a man walked into an office area where he'd once worked and opened fire on those he found there. One died; several were injured.

In Southern California this week, a teen died after being shot in crossfire at a football game. In northern California, a week or so ago, a young woman was brutally raped by multiple young men and left shaking, stripped to the waist, cowering under a park bench. No gunplay there. But Oh, the damage.

What is happening to us? Where is the fury, the rage, the cold hatred coming from? And why do we kill? Where is the compassion for the innocent? Where are the heroes who will stand up for those who are so at risk?

I won't blame it on TV, on Hollywood, on video game producers, on the music industry, on the NFL, the WWF or the UFC movement. No single player can take all the credit.

And it's not political. Please let's don't go there.

Is it the economy? Maybe. But only in the way we'd say rain has something to do with crashes on the highway.

No, it's deeper — something that's probably been building for decades. We're not the nation we once were. The rest of the developed world looks at us in pity. They shake their heads and think about how they don't want to become what we are.

And the denial we live in as our Stars and Stripes flap in the breeze only makes the problem worse. Freedom isn't free.

The role God plays in a nation's life and identity is part of the missing puzzle portion that rarely comes up in news media reporting. It's buried deep in analysis of events like Fort Hood and the Florida shootings — if it shows up at all.

God's people must take notice of the need their country has for healing. And they must pray — repenting, as well, for the sin that so easily besets us. O God, have mercy on us.

This happens to other people.

He was a friend. But I hadn’t seen him in more than 20 years.

The era of Facebook and Twitter and other networking make it possible to connect with people you thought you’d lost touch with. We’ve all been there. You get that invitation to become a friend. You look at the picture. Yikes. Why has everybody changed?

Brian Randone and I had trained for a marathon together. We’d sung together – in the stairwell of the Chicago Avenue subway, in the dining room of Giordano’s Pizza near Water Tower Place.

He was always smiling – one of those guys who had such a presence of the Holy Spirit in his life (or so it seemed) that he could be standing at the counter in McDonald’s, look the clerk in the eye, and start a conversation about God. For me, it wouldn’t work. For Brian, it did. He was younger by several years, but I looked up to him. He just had that something about him.

When I’d been married a year or so, I got a cassette tape in the mail from Brian and it was his voice saying hello, then a bootleg recording began of a song saying, in a variety of ways, “thank you for giving to the Lord.” I think he was in seminary at that point.

I’m not sure when I first saw the news story. It eventually ended up in the Los Angeles Times, but I think it popped up first on AOL news or another search engine, picked up from a TV report or wire service.

I saw the name and thought, “Can’t be.” It sounded the same, but L.A. is a big city – lots of names, lots of people. So I looked real hard at the picture. And my mind tried to peel away the years from that photo to the college-age guy I’d run the streets of Chicago with.

He was under arrest for murder. And the murder, police said, had been beyond brutal. The woman who had been killed died slowly – tortured, the report said. Brian was the one who had called 911 about her death. When police responded, his answers to questions were strange enough that he became the prime suspect.

Reports said Brian had been living with the woman, Felicia Lee, for several months. He’d met her by the pool at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

She had been an actor in porn films and had done modeling. In fact, her face and body were all over the news reports -- moreso than Brian's picture. Stuff like that sells ads. But I wanted to know why. How could my friend have drifted so far? Had he?

The news reports said he had been part of a TV reality show about handsome eligible bachelors. That fit what I remembered about Brian, sort of. He'd been a kind of star-studded type in the ranks of single men at Moody Bible Institute where we were students together. I can't remember if he was dating anyone while I was there. But I was only there a year, part of a grad program that later expanded to a larger course of study.

A web site called "True Crime Report" carried updated news about his trial and plea (not guilty). It also carried dozens of comments from people who had known him for years. Some said they couldn't believe Brian could ever do it. Others said it didn't surprise them in the least. The ones who weren't surprised were the ones who had known him most recently — mentioning alcohol, illegal narcotics, jealousy, temper, and overall bad sense of judgment about himself and others. Most mentioned charisma: that same something I'd noticed in him at Moody.

It took me a few weeks to get his booking number and details about how to visit him at Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. When I got there on a weekday afternoon, I expected short lines because I figured people would be at work. I was wrong. The lines were long. And it was mostly women — older teens and twenty-somethings, some with children. There were Moms, too. The day I was there was a few days before Halloween. One kid was in a witch costume. A girl sitting across from me looked to be in her mid-teens, holding a toddler.

The arrangement was a lot like the DMV. Too much work for too few people. When it gets crazy like that, when the lines get long and tempers wear thin, the people waiting cease to be human. They're being treated like numbers, objects, barriers to the peace and quiet needed to get stuff done. So they take on the identity. They act like irritants to an overworked and underpaid staff.
It becomes the law of the playground all over again. Big kids against the little kids.

When you're face to face with people who hate their jobs and hate those who make their jobs harder than they already are, you're smart to say little and know what to do before you get there. Without knowing it, I was breaking all the rules. I didn't know what to do. I needed help. And that's irritating.

So I went 0-2 in the space of four days trying to see Brian. At my second failure, I got on the phone and tried getting some answers. I got few. But I did get the sense that seeing Brian had become less about him and more about me.

When I got home, I put the Moody yearbook down on the floor of my office, put the bail bond card I'd gotten from Jaime (parking garage entrance) by my Bible, and decided I'd pray for Brian a while.

God was at work. It was time for me to get out of the way.

On Michael Jackson: At his departure

My first 45 rpm record was "ABC" by the Jackson Five.

I walked down to Little's record store on Lake Street in Oak Park near the library, probably in the spring of 1970. And I went alone. This was a big moment.

Record stores in those days were a little like BestBuy's music department — but all confined to one little storefront. And nothing was electronic. It was paper and plastic (well, vinyl). There were rows and rows of bins with long play (L.P.) albums and singles stacked in them. They were organized alphabetically or by genre (rock, soul, country, gospel...) If I remember right, the top 40 singles were stacked on shelves behind the cash register. So the clerk just reached back, picked up "ABC" and put it in a bag for me.

Then, with adrenalin pumping (I wasn't a rich kid, so spending money I'd earned from a paper route felt huge) I plunked down the money and I walked out with my first single.

I was 10.

And to listen to that record, I had to figure out how to insert the thick insert onto the spindle of my parents' stereo unit in the dining room. I did figure it out. And that song was an anthem of my ten year-old world (well, one among a few others.)

Later I would learn that Jackson Five music was something somebody, probably in a high-rise office in New York, had labeled "bubble gum rock." No matter. This was music that grabbed my pre-adolescent mind and heart. I could relate to this kid Michael Jackson.

We were only two years apart (he was older.) And I imagined what it would be like to grow up in Gary, Indiana as he did with all those big brothers. And he was just so poised, so confident — or so it seemed.

Looking back now, given all the white-flight happening in Oak Park at the time, I'm surprised it didn't matter that he was black. I think I hardly noticed.

In my neighborhood, it was all about rep. And rep was partly what you looked like, but mostly about what you could do — usually on the playground in sports or fighting (or both). I wasn't much good at either. But I imagined that Michael Jackson could probably punch out most people on his playground, if called upon; and he could probably get on base when tossed in the schoolyard lineup, or run as fast or faster than anyone in his gym class.

And he could sing.

I could do that, and loved it — though nobody at school knew. Guys didn't do that in my elementary school. But Michael Jackson was lead singer for this group that just had something about it I loved. That made him someone worthy of my respect.

What bothered me a little, back then, was that I didn't see anything in Michael or his brothers that told me they knew God was the real meaning behind the joy and hope in life that I knew was foundational. For a ten year-old, I didn't know much theology, but I knew God was there — and I sensed He was bigger than anything, anywhere.

How could someone who looked, on TV anyway, like he was having so much fun, not know the importance of God in the world? It was a question I pondered then, and that's been on the back burner ever since — with Michael, with others in the entertainment industries.

It's a question I come back to again as I ponder Michael's departure. Did he kill himself? Did he just get sloppy with the meds he took, apparently, to the edge of excess?

People who knew him were saddened but not surprised by the news he'd gone. Comparisons with Elvis crop up often because, well, they're inevitable. There are so many parallels. But I think they're superficial comparisons. Michael was not Elvis.

Journalists will give us the toxicology results in the next few weeks. And someone will tell the world, hopefully through a scrupulous journalist, what was going through Michael's mind in the days and hours before he closed his eyes the last time.

There's a whole generation of kids like me who grew up on Michael's music who need to know the whole story (though I'm staying away from the macabre coverage.)

I'm not out sitting by his star in the sidewalk, but I am grieving. It's like he was a friend. There's something about celebrities and the psychology of fans that creates a false connection. I know all that; I know it's ridiculous. But I feel it anyway.

And what's tragic to me is that, from what I've read, Michael Jackson was a man searching for God's love. He had about him a sense of spiritual journey. Did somebody take the time to sit down with Michael Jackson and tell him how he could have real peace — right there in his world?

Fame, it's said, has a way of leaving the famous isolated and empty. Of course. He never really knew his Dad. That's part of it, too.

But more than that, this was a man who had no one to whom he could turn for real understanding. So he turned inward. And that's a lonely, potentially scary place.

And it hits home to me because I'm still only two years younger than this kid I met in 1970 and whose record I bought at that little store on Lake Street.

I haven't known fame much. Journalism faculty don't get it a lot.

But I've worked as a journalist. And I've observed fame and how it affects people.

Fame is a narcotic, a vapor, a dream. It's a pre-packaged, plastic thing that can be made — under the right lighting, with the other special effects pumped in — to appear supernaturally powerful.

But like vapors and dreams, fame is temporary. And like a narcotic, fame will, over time get in the blood stream and cause damage that's irreversible.

We're not here for fame. Jesus Christ, the only man who can be called truly famous in an eternal sense, was not driven by fame. He held it at arm's length.

And in the end, he left to others the telling of His story. It was better that way.

Yet the enduring power of Christ is that He was the real thing. Everything He claimed to be, actually was. Everything He promised, He did.

I wish Michael Jackson had learned this — about fame, about himself, about what he was and what he could do. I wish he'd met Christ. How different things could have been.

My prayer now is that those who are Michael's peers in the entertainment industry find God in ways that reach into their souls — right there in New York, in L.A., in Nashville, in Chicago. I pray, too, that those who have watched his tragic life as fans (the tens of thousands worldwide, and those of my generation who sense a bond with him) will, with God's prompting, sense they don't have to go the way he did.

There is hope. And it's not in the studio or on the concert stage.

It's in that quiet place, before God, with our arms open wide. Accepting His embrace.

Journalism and the shifting ground under our feet

Jim Romanesko, the Poynter blogger assigned to sit in the control tower as the planes go down all over the airspace, talked today about how The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are in trouble: big trouble.

Romanesko's blog also points us to Roger Simon's observation in Columbia Journalism Review (from a look-back at the McCain camp's bullying of the press) that most Americans are already so mad at the press that beating up on them only increases sympathy for them. Made McCain look like a Steelers tackler kicking a poodle. (Or Kurt Warner.)

Then we have ABC News (owned by Disney, remember) denying that a talk-show format program is bumping Nightline out of its spot in the batting order.

So who cares about news anymore? The people who need it.

And they'll get it, too. Even if they have to pay more. There's a scene in "The Count of Monte Cristo" where the count, seated at breakfast with the young man he'll later learn is his son, tells the boy that he pays well to find out what's happening in every city he visits or has interests. That's fiction imitating life. It was true in Alexander Dumas' day. It was true when our nation was founded, it was true when the newspaper barons built palaces to honor themselves — places like Hearst Castle and Tribune Tower — and it's still true today.

Maybe the notion of daily news for the masses has become a questionable commodity. But we need to take a step back. It's not the news that people don't like. It's how that news comes to them. So some don't like the wood-pulp folded thing in the plastic bag in their driveway. They still want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow and what happened at the Santa Monica Airport where there was all that smoke yesterday. And they want details. Lots of details — like if anyone's hurt or dead. The amateur pilots want to know enough detail that they can stir their coffee with it at Starbucks (if the one down their street is still open. And if it's closed, they want to know why, and if the one by their brother's house is closing soon.)

I don't want to be flip about this. The shifting of land under our feet is scary. I sat through a magnitude 4.5 quake last month and I know.

But I know what a lot of journalism educators do. It's the young people. The cigar-chompers in Chicago who are covening to talk about saving that city's journalism are making a big mistake. They forgot to invite anybody under 30 to sit at the table in front of microphones.

Reality can smell bad

Homelessness got on board the train this week.

The Metrolink system in California is a culture unto itself. It's a world of people in suits and business casual with older women or twenty-somethings dabbing makeup, teens with plugged ears punching music players, men thumbing PDAs or tapping laptops. A few talk loudly on blue-tooth devices making business deals so the world can hear — though they get looks from those around them. Metrolink can be loud, but not that loud. Ages range from about 16 to 70. You don't often see young children or infants, and you rarely see people old enough that they can't easily navigate steps. Strollers are rare. Metrolink is supposed to be disability-accessible, but the practical reality is that it's a fast ride for people who move fast. There are exceptions, and when they're aboard, they're noticed — a kind of spectacle for the group to observe.

Some read the paper (really). Others sleep, but in a kind of dignified way. It's a controlled world. You don't mess with the system — not for long. Kids who climb aboard with no ticket get citations from the conductor or one of the many L.A. County Sheriff's Deputies who patrol the train. Ticket-less kids get found out because, well, they just stick out. You know them. When people in downtown L.A. board Metrolink (thinking it's Amtrak), they're spotted right away, too. It's the big luggage (though a few luggage-toting people do take Metrolink to get home from an Amtrak stop in L.A.) People who don't speak English — regardless the cultural background — become a problem, too on the morning Metrolink routes, unless they're bilingual.

This week, about halfway between the Riverside downtown station and L.A. Union station, a woman boarded in a dark hooded sweatshirt and grayish pants. Her face was wrinkled and dry, her shoulder-length hair matted and stringy. Her feet, in worn-looking sandals, were leathery. She looked tired. And she reeked of dried urine — a stench so strong it had the sting of ammonia in it. She carried a small reddish plastic grocery bag with various items, including a black velvety thing with pinkish tassels. Was she homeless? She fit the stereotype. And train riding is all about sizing people up — fast. It helps you know where to sit, or not sit. Once in a seat, your knees are inches from the person across from you. Depending on the girth of the person next to you, it can get cozy — in a bad way. Respiratory illness spreads fast on Metrolink.

The sweat-shirted woman dropped into the aisle seat across from me and within minutes the woman directly across from me rose and trudged upstairs. The man seated across and to the left of me was reading the paper and, as if waking, asked under his breath, "What's that smell?" He looked over at the woman, who had now moved over to the window and was huddled against it, trying to sleep or already out. She looked now like a rumpled pile of laundry. "What's her problem?" he asked me. I didn't answer. The man looked at a woman seated across from the sweat-shirted woman and, with his eyes and by mouthing the words, offered the seat across from me. She rose and moved over and the two gave each other knowing looks and shook their heads.

If the sweat-shirted woman was homeless, and even if she wasn't, there was something about her that was a confrontation of this commuter cultural system. Just by showing up, she was reminding these routine-minded people that there was a larger, very-hard world outside this narrow metal car rolling down predictable steel tracks. This was a woman who — by choice or by circumstances forced on her — was living proof that the world can be unbearable. She was hard to look at, hard to be near, maybe harder to understand.

I noticed that nobody confronted her — not even the conductor, who walked by and sized her up without pausing in his gait. He could have asked for tickets. I'd seen him do so in other circumstances, carding the whole train car to nab someone he suspected was a freeloader.

But nobody tried to help her, either. That's also a rule of commuter life. Those who don't fit the system get left out.

Metrolink is a place where the lives of desperate people get hidden under a veneer of disciplined control. You punch your ticket, you board the train on time, you get off where you're supposed to. But underneath is often the pain of an abusive spouse, kids in trouble, a court system that tramples, a boss that demeans, an economy that sucks the life out of a woman or man. It can produce a kind of silent scream that can be seen in the eyes, in the tone of voice, in the very gait.

But when these board the train with their stooped weariness, if they are part of the accepted commuter cultures, there is a degree of comfort — laughter and a kind of solace, albeit mixed with pain, in these cloth-covered seats of the Metrolink cars. There are card games, there's nut bread or chocolates handed out at holiday times. It's all a kind of coping.

But this woman knew nothing of that. She was asleep in the corner of a world that wanted to forget she was there. She was left alone as the system moved on all around her and the train rolled on, stop by stop, to the end of the line.