Inheriting the Wind

It was somehow fitting that George Thomas should die during a storm.

His whole life had been spent in one, a part of the thunder and the howling winds that embraced his history.

He told me once that only when he had learned to deal with the violent elements within himself could he understand the storm of emotions in others.

Thomas spent his whole life at the task, riding wild currents of human temperament in an effort to quiet the thunder and ease the gales that cause violence on the street and in the home.

When he died the other day of a heart attack at age 54, L.A. lost a man who was part poet and part ruffian, who spoke the language of rage as well as the language of atonement.

He worked at the Southern California Counseling Center, founder and director of a program that dealt with men who beat women and children.

I saw him walk among them once like a preacher among lions, seeking with words and example to simultaneously understand and tame the growling instincts that had got them to the center in the first place.

I saw him bring strong men to tears and I heard him draw from them the essence of their anger, the seed of their violence, when they sobbed and said, “I’m afraid. . . .”

“What they’re afraid of,” he would say later, “is themselves.”

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Even as I write about Thomas, the wind howls around my house, as wild and cold as the life he faced from the moment of birth.

Beaten by his father from infancy, he took those lessons of rage and violence to the streets of Detroit where he was raised, doing to others what had been done unto him.

This is too often the lesson we carry and pass on: accepting what is unacceptable until at some point someone rises among the crowd and says, “Enough.”

Fittingly, the season we celebrate glorifies a man who, 2,000 years ago, said, “Enough,” in an effort to still the winds that blew through the world he knew. It wasn’t enough, but the lessons he taught fit into the tapestry woven by many over the centuries, which someday may still be completed.

Thomas was no messiah, but he understood the value of one man deciding to end the violence in his own life. He couldn’t tell me how or why that decision was made, only that he somehow came to accept that there was a higher form of survival beyond the fist.

“There’s survival of the spirit,” he said one day as I sat in on a session of his Abuse Prevention Program. “At the end of our lives, that’s the only thing that counts.”

It was what he taught on the streets of South-Central L.A. when he came here as a young man, talking to gang members on his own, and what he brought to the Counseling Center when he joined its ranks 20 years ago.

I heard his efforts encapsulated in the case of a scowling giant with an explosive temper sent to the center by the courts for battering women. He stood like a man touched by an angel and proudly announced he had been slapped in the face eight times by a woman but instead of responding with clenched fists, he had turned and walked away.

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Programs against violence abound in L.A. Equally abundant are those who, having turned away from violence of many kinds, attempt to convince others to follow their paths of enlightenment.

George Thomas was one of many out there who brave the storm as much for their own inner peace as for the tranquillity of the communities in which they live.

I guess my kinship with him embodied a more personal spirit. I was a battered kid too, and while I rejected violence early in life, I understood the roar of the storm; I walked with lions.

And, too, I understood those who, in the sessions Thomas led, finally found that violence was ultimately rooted in fear: fear of failure, fear of the past and, finally, fear of their own rampaging instincts.

Thomas refused to tiptoe among their kaleidoscoping emotions, but neither did he trample on them. He led the men through their lives with a combination of skill, experience, compassion and strength, realizing that he was continuing to deal with himself as much as he was dealing with them.

So doing, he left a legacy of lessons for us all: that rage emerges from within and to cope with it on a mass scale, we’ve got to understand ourselves first. The winds that blow today remind us that Thomas faced the storm in himself and then turned to face the storm in others.

If there’s a heaven, I doubt that he’d even want to be there. More likely, he’s walking among the tortured souls of hell, quieting the wild passions that got them there in the first place. He was that kind of guy.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com