I am burdened by deepening fear. The riots have faded into history, your history. I wonder if you trouble over those days bygone. Is it part of your vernacular? Is it part of your living communal horror?
The LA Riots of 1992 were less, I believe, a reaction to any one particular issue and more symptomatic of a social dysfunction. Certainly an act of social injustice sparked and fanned the flames of indignation, but the central issue is vast and ambiguous, like the neural misfiring sparking along the desert floor of our unconscious.
America displays its schizophrenia daily. Tune into your Sony TV screen. It’s there. Flickering at a maddening impulse in red blue green its hatred and injustice, it pulsates alienation. No, I’m not implying your TV is the cause of america’s woes, but it is one open infected sore. It‘s not the disease, it’s the breach, the hole in the dike, a place where the infection can enter.
A few days ago I overheard someone speaking about Tom Clancy and with the end of the Cold War he’d be at a loss for material. America had no one to hate any longer. America had been embroiled for so long in its “domestic” dispute with its former lover that it had no one to slap around anymore. And when an abusive father runs out of punching bags, he goes looking for something new to bloody his knuckles against. Needless to say, Tom Clancy will find an inexhaustible supply of material for more novels of shadow armies and hate mongers as America turns on herself. The apocalypse, fear and slow death. I smell a book or a movie there somewhere.
I write in a confused and torn state. I am confused because this outbreak was foreseeable, that it should have come as no surprise. I am confused because it was allowed to happen. It has all the trappings of a social experiment, cold and calculated. If we were in a hospital, this feverish patient wouldn’t be subjected to a sauna, would she? No, sympathetic medicine would do all it could to stabilize and calm the symptoms. Only in a clinical experiment is the subject suffered to the threshold of endurance. It is here that I believe that the evidence lies within. An illness exist, it is evident that we are all suffering some measure of the disease, but though it is obvious that it functions at epidemic proportions there is no attempt to, first, admit a disease exist, and secondly, apply some preventive measures to identify and treat the sickness.
Sadly, I am a fatalist. It’s in my blood. My people face death by smiling it in the face and taking a stiff drink. Unfortunately, the patient is dying. I’m not saying give up. I believe we need to find a healthy donor body, and salvage what we can.
I believe the “issue” is not an issue at all, I am not tied to the emotionalism of the discussion. I am not bound by the morality or the trappings of righteousness. Racism exists. Racism exists like cancer. Racism is a disease like any other disease, the disease of evil. If we concentrate our attentions here we need not worry of cutting the head off the wrong snake.
Our President is the perfect expression for his time; “Historically speaking incidents like this have always brought about change.”
This is a statement of gross insensitivity, the detached language and blaring illumination to the source of the problem. The statement illustrates the creed of the unenlightened and the realm of no imagination! Is it not disturbingly clear by now that the institution of politics have failed us all? The average man’s involvement in the forward momentum of this civilization is nil. If you believe your vote is meaningful, ask the occupants of a bullet-riddled Black Panther headquarters, or AIM resisters looking down the barrel of a .50 caliber how they feel about the power of their dissent.
The system, in which we live, politics, is corrupt, decrepit and disintegrating and 1992 should be marked as a defining moment in the overall condition of the patient.
The LA riots will not go down in history as an isolated event. I believe it will mark the beginning of the end for the “old ways”. Speaking broadly, not to limit ourselves to a social-historical context, we must move away from the antiquated canonical cotton-gin of a system that has been plaguing us for so long. I don’t know the difference between a slave and a sharecropper, do you?
Time will only tell.
Written 5/5/1992
