My mediation practice is still perking along.  If litigation is a team sport, mediation is a solo affair.  I get court-ordered referrals across four counties.  Last week took me to the furthest one, out in the north Denver suburbs between the oil refinery and the airport.  It’s a 90-minute bus-ride through places I’d driven past for years but never visited before, former farm and cattle towns swallowed a generation ago by swaths of indistinguishable tract housing and strip malls, then swallowed again by spreading poverty and industrial blight.  The bus is mostly empty: an Indian couple with a toddler in a stroller, looking lost, who ride only two blocks and then disembark, improbably, outside a car dealership; a girl with green hair who gets off at a Taco Bell; two tough-looking Latino youths with music so loud you can hear it out of their earbuds two seats away; the obligatory guy in the back, talking to himself because no one else will.

It gets me to thinking about the connections people depend on to feel alive, and that we all risk having fall away.  In this work I’ve met I met an undocumented mom fleeing abuse, leaving her kids behind, distrusting that the courts would help her get them back, and lacking a decent place for them to live if she did.  Another man faithfully, competently worked a tech job for years, got laid off the year before his retirement, then lost his house and marriage.  An upwardly-mobile couple divorced after being overwhelmed by the needs of their profoundly disabled child.  In each, a different loss of other, but a common loss of self.

Riding home, I’m thankful that the undocumented mom qualifies for Medicaid and sees a psychologist.  That the laid-off man gets unemployment and job training.  That the disabled child is included in her regular education classroom because of IDEA.  That even the guy talking to himself in the back of the bus knows the driver, says goodbye to him, and gets a friendly wave in response.   Politicians on the right refer to “entitlements.”  Those on the left speak of the “social safety net.”  Both sides speak primarily about money.   But I think these services also help preserve and restore the social web of self, which, when completely torn away, leaves us with no bootstraps left to pull.