Thoughts On The L.A. Riots

I just watched a documentary called Uprising: Hip Hop And The L.A. Riots. It is narrated by Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dog for the hip hop illiterate) and tells a pretty objective account of what happened during the end of that history making month of August in 1992. It did a very good job of showing the oxymoronic aspects of the events during and after the riots, such as showing the unifying of the African American community (to destroy their own neighborhoods and raid Korean shops).

I remember watching the riots on T.V. I was 10 and a naive pseudo social anarchist and wanted so much to go to L.A. and see what was  going on for myself (again, naive). I've always been a rebel, and I was fascinated . There was fire and looting and fighting back against the police and everything else that goes along with a city when, as The Roots album that would come out seven years later would put it, "things fall apart." At the time I thought that it was a perfectly logical reaction to the injustice that sparked the largest riots in U.S. since the 1960s. But, being 10 years old, I had no real idea about how truly insane and self destructive the events of the spring of 1992 were. But in the years to come, two events in my life gave me an intimate perspective on violence and rioting.

Almost a year and a half after the L.A. riots, I was living in Sheridan, Wyoming when a man walked onto the football field during 2nd period gym class and began shooting in random directions before taking his own life. I remember hearing the shots, the screams, the teachers melting down in front of their students. Then, during my freshman year at Albuquerque High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico we had a full scale riot at my school when the power went out during a storm and when the backup generator failed (unfortunately I can't find any articles online about this event. If anyone out there has any information about it, or if you were there, please post in the comments section.) These two events changed my opinion on "civil unrest" forever. 

After experiencing these two events, my naivete thoroughly destroyed, they just make me wish we, as a species, could figure out how to treat each other with at least some modicum of respect. Sure, my two examples pale in comparison to what transpired in L.A. in 1992 (or the Watts riots in 1965, for that matter), but they served, in my life, as examples of what not to do. Riots solve nothing. Attempted murder followed by suicide doesn't fix anything. Running wild in your school setting trash cans on fire and fighting anything that moves doesn't solve anything. The only thing these events do is scar our minds and destroy our communities. Rioting and looting may look cool on TV, but in the real world, all they do is perpetuate the division of our species and make it nigh impossible for us to begin the process of making our society better and safer, for everyone.