I see some crazy things in New York. If you spend enough time in the city, you’re bound to. It’s simply unavoidable. There are too many people with too many different intentions for a day in the city to be uneventful. On the rarest occasions, I witness people in serious conflict with each other. That happened today. It’s still shocking when you see a fight and though I can’t say I agree with that form of conflict resolution, I think in this case that I might understand what’s at the root of it.

The last fight I saw was at least ten years ago on 30th St. Two bums were going at it just after 9pm. I got out of a rehearsal studio and I heard them bellowing back and forth at each other. The sound echoed in the canyon of the empty street and I couldn’t immediately ascertain its origins from the dark sidewalk. I finally located them about halfway down the block. When I did, the angrier of the two had just broken a wine bottle and was brandishing the weapon in the other guy’s direction. How absolutely classic, I thought at the time. Fighting in the street with broken bottles is some old-school brawlin’! I quickly came to my senses and was sure to cross the street and get out of there before things got too gruesome, or worse, closer to me.

The fight I saw today was different. It was at an ungodly hour in the World Trade Center PATH station downtown. The place was crawling with people from New Jersey who’d just gotten off the train to go to work. That mass of humanity under the most ideal of circumstances takes some skill to negotiate, since the whole damn station is one big construction site. You have to ascend no fewer than three stair levels before you get to the street. This incident occurred just one level up from the platform.

It wasn’t two filthy street guys. The fight was between two of the most demure-looking men in the late 40s or early fifties. They were both fairly tall and lean. Where they weren’t balding, they were graying at the temples. They both wore similar jackets, in shades of blue and made of that shushy polyester material people wear when they go skiing. The guy with the upper hand wore glasses. They looked like they could have been brothers, both of whom work jobs that don’t require hand washing upon completion of their duties.

When I came upon them, the bespectacled one had the other one over the railing, pulling at his jacket where in another time there would have been lapels. He was screaming something angrily at the other guy, possibly a warning. (I couldn’t hear over the Flo & Eddie album on my MP3 player.) As people fanned out around them, I did what I normally do when I see a fight. I checked them both from a distance for weapons. Not this time, but of course, I still wanted no part of the scene. Just before I moved behind a ramp and up the second staircase, I saw the guy with the glasses “hauling off.” Many people kept turning around, trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the scuffle. I just bounded around them, my own conflicts to confront.

What the whole thing was about, I’ll never know. Maybe one guy just crowded the other too much. The boiling point was finally reached. It was just the wrong day for both of them. As I traipsed through the streets, the fight far behind me, I studied the faces of the people I passed. There were hundreds of them. The more I looked, the more it seemed to be the wrong day for them too. Could the misery on so many faces be my imagination? Suddenly they were all corporate workers, nearing their limits.

I’m sure a commuter’s plight, whatever it is, could be considered by some to be a luxury problem since he still has a job, but even those not yet in dire straits can potentially bear a debilitating psychological burden. If it was just being crammed into disgusting trains, it might be different. But for most people in corporate America, a subtle demoralization continues when one gets to work.

Working in offices staring at computers is a tragic existence. A corporate job can be a dehumanizing charade in which there is no beginning and end, with a requirement to pretend one cares about something which was at best a trade off for the promise of life to be lived on the off hours. Instead of merely scratching and clawing for a crust of bread, days are spent surrounded by lies, politics, endless unknowns, fear and the ultimate surrender of the self. In many cases, it’s all to maintain some preconceived idea of success, a house in New Jersey, a car or two. However, over time these affectations can become little more than tangible proof that one’s been duped into cycle that is sure to swallow him whole. One in which every dollar is already spent and nothing is ever truly accomplished. The actual “work” means very little. It’s only there to occupy him, to deter him from the constant consideration of who’s above him and who’s below.

A corporate career can require so many compromises along the way that no one, two or even three changes can deliver you from the crisis of spirit it can foster. The result is inaction, even more compromise. In short, it can be a trap who’s bait is an empty promise. One that is eager to waste your life and then blame you for the choice as soon as you’re used up.

When primitive man, in some ways whose psyche we still possess, had hunted enough to eat for the day, he could rest. His fears amounted to attacks by things he could see or hear. He is completely unsuited to a corporate job, in which no amount of food can ever be enough and attackers are anything he can imagine. Rest is allowed only by the permission of his conscience. After years, coping with desperation and hopelessness becomes his true work.

This is unlike the conclusion of Langston Hughes in “A Dream Deferred” in which the poet asks if a dream deferred explodes, conjuring images of riots in Harlem. Hughes would probably have claimed that those corporate stiffs this morning, slugging it out in their psychological desolation, do in fact have a luxury problem. But it’s unfair to claim that a guy with a house in Jersey has no right to be despondent and searching for meaning. It’s also not inconceivable that a human being under extreme stress, whose attackers can’t be identified and who’s worst fears are manufactured, might choose someone in which his oppression can be personified and attack that guy for the silliest of reasons. I think that’s what I witnessed today. People are still human, no matter where you think they fall in the social strata.

With union regulations and laws concerning safety, health and child labor, reform at the beginning of the last century served to make the workplace safer for your body. Perhaps in the post-industrial age, labor reform is required to make work safe for your mind. Just because people can make a living at a desk doesn’t mean that they are not being endangered psychologically and emotionally. There is less concern for their rights per se, since there’s no clock to punch, no hourly wage, and no visible scars. But the dangled carrot, a promise that may not be realized, can be devastating to health and well-being. Those working to make someone else rich are told that they’re working to rise. It’s a mind game in which the rules constantly change. Only some figure out how to survive. It’s pretty sinister when you think about it.

I didn’t realize it until now, but my reaction to the fight this morning was not as much minding my own business like a proper heartless New Yorker, but more “There, but for the grace of God, go I…”

I wonder what happened…