Michael

“The public outcry grew, dampening enthusiasm for the project at the LACTC. Jacki Bacharach, a Valley native who now lived on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the far southern part of the county, headed the committee studying various Valley routes. She held numerous community hearings that resulted in an outpouring of negativity from local residents. “When the Blue Line was being built, I would go to Compton and Watts a lot to go to meetings, without problem,” Bacharach said, referring to South Los Angeles communities with a reputation for crime. “But when I went to the Valley to do the public hearings for the development of rail, I asked for an escort to my car, because those people were like crazy people. They were threatening, they felt more entitled, and they were just not really nice people to deal with. And I grew up in the Valley, and I kept thinking these are ‘my people.’ Nobody could agree with anybody.”
― Ethan N. Elkind, Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City

“Pain could make a coward of you; the experience might weaken her resolve. And her resolve was to be nursed day and night. If she ever felt it slipping—if the thought of that blood lather in her windpipe ever began to frighten her—the cure was a documentary about Jane Goodall’s early years among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She’d seen it so many times already that often just a twenty-minute refresher was enough. To be taken back to the 1960s, when it was still possible for a human being to face a wild animal without grief, without shame, without any inkling of the Black Hole gaping wider and wider—to compare that innocence with the present day, when almost every such contact was soaked through with horror and loss—that was all it took to restore to her an iron determination. Wittgenstein, when he was contemplating suicide, had summed up the mindset as “the state of not being able to get over a particular fact.” As she’d said so many times to Halyard, she wasn’t suicidal—and yet that fit her pretty well. Everything was broken. The only remaining valid actions were those taken in reaction to that fact, and they were valid only in proportion to the honesty and completeness of the reaction.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker