Springtime incivility

On March 21 a man pounded on the door outside the military recruiting office next to the Santee trolley station. He yelled through the door as he pounded: “Open the f’n door! I want to join the f’n Army!” He was gone by the time sheriff’s deputies arrived.

On March 31 a man sat down in the computer lab at the El Cajon public library on Douglas Street near Magnolia and blasted his music.

“Sir, you need to turn your music down,” a librarian who came into the computer lab told him. He didn’t like being called sir. He stood up and insisted she call him “dude.”

The librarian told him he had to leave. “No,” he replied. “If I have to leave I’m gonna raise hell. You better leave me alone if you don’t want your windows broken,” he continued.

After a library guard told him he had to leave and they called the police, the man made his way out of the library yelling, “You’re probably all a bunch of liberals and Democrats!”

On Monday afternoon, April 2, an agitated man walked back and forth on the Grossmont trolley station platform threatening bystanders. “F* all you white people in here!” he yelled. He walked up and down the platform saying, “you, you” to every white person he saw and “not you, not you” to every non-white person.

He stopped in front of an elderly white couple and screamed in their face, “I will never pick any cotton for you!”

An African-American couple discussed the incident.

She said, “That was so mean what that guy was saying. Can you imagine if it was a white person running up and down the trolley station saying those things to black people?”

“It’s not the same thing,” he said.

She replied, “What do you mean it's not the same thing. It is the same thing.”

He insisted, “It's not even close to being the same thing.”