The sheriff and other downtown tales

Last night I worked until 7 pm, as I sometimes do. When I arrived at the parking garage to get my car, a sheriff sat on a chair in the elevator lobby, reading the evening paper. He got up as I was about to enter the elevator and joined me, explaining that he was there to protect people like me from whatever might happen in a downtown Houston parking garage on an early Friday night. He walked me to my car, made sure that I got safely under way, and then presumably returned to his post to wait for the next person to protect. Remarkable, huh?

On the way to the car I asked him about the crime rate in downtown Houston. He said that in the last few years it had improved dramatically, since the authorities had relocated most of the homeless people to south of downtown. I live south of downtown and I can attest that he's right, that's where the homeless hang out. So, the problem hasn't been solved, it has only been moved places. Beautiful governance, right?

I don't drive to work every day. I am lucky that the bus stops at the nearest corner from my house (well, the gated community in which I live these days) and it takes me to within a short distance of work. Of all the hundreds of people I have seen in the bus, only two were white and they didn't look like they had a comfy bed to rest in at night. The rest are overwhelmingly black, with some Asians and Hispanics thrown in the mix. Most of them don't look like they hold profitable jobs and some look like they haven't held any kind of a job in years. Quite a few give me surprised stares, as in "what's a white, well dressed woman doing here??".

This is all pretty mind-boggling. While I do know that the US aren't exactly setting the world standard for social equality, I don't know that I was prepared to find myself living in a fancy house in a fancy community where the inhabitants need gates and security guards to protect themselves from the poverty of the people around. Or that I would need police escort to get my car at night. Or that I'd be in a racially segregated bus. This reminds me a smidgen of what I've read and heard of Bogotá, what I've seen in Manila, even apartheid. It's disturbing, to say the least.