Alonso Yanez
The first of March was a breezy, gray day in the San Fernando Valley, one of those days that force Angelenos to wear the winter outfits we keep in our closets to use for only two months out of a year.
Maybe the increasingly angry El Niño phenomenon will change that.
As I enjoyed a walk through Balboa Park with a dear friend, I encountered a scene that warmed up my day.
A pair of hormone-pumped high school students from Birmingham High School renewed my hope in our youth when they decided to solve their problems with a good old fist fight that lasted approximately five minutes.
It convinced me that things are not that different from when I went to high school.
In a world hurt by guns it was actually revitalizing to witness a type of fight almost extinct in our volatile times.
After exchanging their best fighting moves, and with more than 20 euphoric viewers, the two niños controlled their anger and started to talk.
A few words were spoken and it ended up with their little group of friends escorting them to the bus stop, while the two combatants examined their bruised-up faces.
Los Angeles is not just Hollywood-glorified Beverly Hills or Malibu.
This might be the capital of the motion picture industry, which venerates macho characters with no respect for life, but it is also a city where gangs have drawn their own boundaries, conducting their business through drive-bys with almost total impunity.
After adding that to the image we have of our bellicose world, marked by hypocritical leaders who under-fund schools while authorizing limitless budgets for the armed forces and a 15-year-old gangster-wannabe who tags his nickname on the window of a bus ridden by the Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, it is actually quite refreshing to see two kids solving their differences with their fists and not with guns.
As I walked closer to the fight I yelled, “I got ten on the guy with dark pants,” trying to make conversation with the spectators, who just laughed and kept watching their friends beat each other up.
Just like in my old North Hollywood High School, also in the San Fernando Valley, where the students had a preferred spot to solve their problems away from the crowded streets, these kids had come to the beautiful Balboa Park to end their disputes.
They renewed my faith in humanity, making me hope for a world in which a fist fight, not a shoot out, is our last resort.
I guess it is hard for me not to make these connections after one of my friends, who made wrong decisions in his life, was killed last week by a rival gang in another drive-by in Los Angeles, leaving his loved ones with a hole in their hearts and another six in his favorite Dodgers jacket.
It is just one among innumerable deaths caused by those instruments of destruction we consider so indispensable that we actually created an amendment in our constitution to protect our right to possess them.
We are human and therefore imperfect and condemned to fight every now and then, incapable of resolving our differences in a civilized manner.
But why let an ideal or a problem get so big that it convinces us to end another life?
As I thought this, my friend proposed that it would be nice to see our president and Osama getting down in a caged match UFC-style, until someone was reminded that pain is a very common and tangible feeling in the world.
When I returned home I thought not much had changed since I went to high school in our marvelous Los Angeles Unified School District, where sometimes you solved your problems with your fists, but lived to fight another day in this indifferent world.
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