In the early '90s, I spent almost four mostly miserable years driving a cab in San Francisco. One stark memory I have of the ordeal was the day I watched a cabbie recount a tense encounter with some upper-income yuppies in Golden Gate Park.

At the time, the park was all-but closed to traffic on Sundays, to mollify weekend skaters, bicyclists and dog-walkers in the semi-tony west end of the city known as "the avenues".

My compatriot had driven into the park for a fare at the M.H. de Young Museum, as taxis were allowed to make quick in-and-out pick-ups in the park for phoned-in orders. As he was making his way out, he was surrounded by angry pedestrians, demanding to know why he was poisoning their day with his toxic automobile exhaust.

Standing at the pay window that evening, he obviously was still shaken by his experience. Several of the just-minted environmental activists accosting him screamed and shook fists in his face; another threatened him with a skateboard. They decided to let him pass after they noticed his fare, whom he'd picked up with full approval from police patrols, was a handicapped elderly woman with a wheelchair stowed in the trunk.

"It was like lynch mob," he exclaimed, his apprehension blending into angry outrage at being braced so casually by a knot of folks who had no genuine, passionate investment in threatening to beat his brains out, probably earned a lot more income than he did, and drove cars more luxurious than his own. (Paradoxically, they probably considered these vehicles exempt from high standards they demanded of lower-class emissions.)

This mob scene was purely of the moment, feeding some inner moral dominion each of the cabbie's accusers truly believed they deserved. I thought about this yesterday, when Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton dismissed as "knuckleheads" rioters who tore up downtown and the area around Staples Center Sunday night.

If that's true, all of us carry around our Inner Knucklehead. Because I think any of us can "go off" and do something really stupid, something perverse and utterly unlike our true selves, something purely of the moment. It can manifest itself in high moral dudgeon, or frenzied delusions from vicarious athleticism, or just plain evil masquerading as justice. 

We're mass in the universe, and as such, we're relative to time and space. Space, we understand, and it's easy to see how it affects our behavior and mindset. We can acclimate to almost any surroundings - but these environments affect us in ways we may recognize only tangentially. If I were living in an inner-city tenement, I would be a lot different person than I'd be living in the exclusive environs of Malibu. And in both settings, I'd be a lot different than I am in my current reality.

But time affects us just as profoundly. We're creatures very much of the moment. When I was a grade-schooler, I'd see performances of The Beatles ( or just about any British-invasion band ) on television and be swept up by screams of girls in the audience. It was a high-pitched, singular tear across the airwaves. There was no "wave" in the sound, no modulation in tone; it was a static beam of pure wail, and it created excitement on its own, apart from the music to which it responded. Those girls were united in an auditory moment. It erased class and all other distinction. They were, in that instant, one.

It's much the same as lynch mobs or Los Angeles Lakers fans. These groupthink monsters are created in a specific moment. The passions - murderous or brainless - are stoked only by the specific reality alive - or seemingly extant - at the time. Those populating these mobs wouldn't, under normal circumstances, kill others or ram cinder blocks through Metro bus windows. They are, throughout most of their lives, normal, "innocent civilians".

In the past week or so, there's been a lot of discussion about "hate" propelling violence such as the shootings in Wichita and at the Holocaust Museum. In most of these ruminations, hate is broken off as exclusive providence of a political worldview, of "Right-wing thinking". But I think that's a mistake - and potentially a dangerous one. Unfortunately, hate is universal. I think it dwells in all of us, a common downside of the human condition. Hate is no respecter of persons. It's our demon inside, awaiting its chance - its moment - to rampage.

If we believe hate exists only among those holding specific political views, or those whose opinions don't scrupulously match our own, or are confined to this or that race or religious or ethnic group... we court bloodbath. It would be wiser to remove "hate" from politics. Because hate is an emotional component. It is specific and human; it is detached, mostly, from the part of us that is our public face. It may - or may not - inform our politics. To the extent we politicize hate, we allege our own freedom from it; in reality, we mask our own potential to act at its behest. In that, we fool only ourselves. Perhaps, disastrously. We cannot absolve ourselves of "hate" simply by accusing others of harboring it.

Most atrocities in history were committed by people absolutely convinced they were doing the right thing. They were commited by "everyday" folks who, in the time and place they found themselves, followed misdirection from their very own monsters.