A Catalyst for Change

No matter how angry, no matter how frustrated, no matter how scared, Louis Anderson was wrong to respond to persistent provocation from neighborhood kids by brandishing a rifle at them.

But how could the harassment of this 90-year-old Ventura man have been allowed to continue for several weeks, even though neighbors knew about it? Why didn’t those neighbors talk with the kids and their parents or alert police so they could take preventive action to keep the peace before it turned into a crisis?

Fortunately, this confrontation did not end in bloodshed. Yet it dramatically illustrates the disconnection of the youngest and oldest residents from each other and the community.

Neighbors described Anderson as chatty and friendly. A 12-year-old who lives near Anderson on Shearwater Street in Montalvo conceded that he and two friends had been harassing him.

“We were knocking on his door, kicking it and then running away,” he told The Times. “I don’t know why we were doing it, we just were.”

The pestering had gone on for weeks, other neighbors said. Some of them apparently considered calling police. But nobody did.

On Jan. 25, after several provocations, Anderson opened his front door and pointed the unloaded gun at the youths, telling them to leave him alone. Two neighbors called police, who took him into custody for mental evaluation.

There’s nothing new about kids bugging their elderly neighbors. The very young have no concept of how it is to be old and alone. If their parents and grandparents have not helped them to understand, then the community must step in.

Agencies that work with seniors and with youth in Ventura County should use this incident as a catalyst for programs that bring their constituencies together. The very old and the young have far more in common than most of them realize, starting with limited physical abilities, sometimes inconsistent judgment and an unwelcome degree of dependence on others.

In hindsight it’s easy to say that someone should have spoken up to prevent this situation from escalating. May that lesson be remembered on other streets and in other cities--anywhere a bad situation is festering because nobody cares enough to stop it.