Reality Collides With L.A.’s Image

You talk about scary videotape. Try on these images, Los Angeles:

* A running jump and kick to the head of a dazed trucker, down on all fours in the middle of an intersection.

* Bottles exploding against the skull of an unfortunate man who was pulled from his two-tone Bronco.

* The palm trees of the Hollywood Freeway, ignited like tiki torches.

* The adrenal excitement on the faces of teen-age boys, exhilarated from tossing trash cans and lighted papers through the doors of City Hall South.

* The news helicopters’ bird’s-eye views of the couple hundred fires that dotted the landscape of South-Central.

We watched, our stomachs sinking ever lower in sick amazement, as our city was consumed by unnatural disaster in the wake of the Rodney King acquittals.

“Preserve us from us,” said the Rev. Cecil Murray after Wednesday night’s rally at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, a rally that started as a unanimous call for peace and ended in dispirited division.

Is this the start of the long hot summer of ‘92?

The acrid stench of smoke across this city on Thursday morning was the stink of racism.

Who is responsible? The police? The jury? The gangs?

Maybe the better question is not who but why?

Until the economy collapsed on itself, until Rodney King was beaten and then the killer of Latasha Harlins went virtually unpunished, many lived a lie in Los Angeles.

With our moderate and pleasant black mayor, our growing home equity and our temperate climate, it was easy to pretend-- almost --that we didn’t have racial problems. Well, of course, we have the gang situation. But that’s not the same as racial strife, is it?

Besides, we don’t have riots in Los Angeles. Other cities have race riots: screwed up places like Detroit and Miami.

Not us. Not here. We left that all behind in 1965.

Or so we thought.

But this city is as segregated as the worst of them. The divisions between the haves and have-nots are deep and poisonous. And this week, the poison seeped to the surface and ignited.

We have pretended for too long that it wasn’t here in the first place.

In a city like Detroit, a city so completely riven by its long, hot summer of ’65 that the wounds will probably never heal, people talk constantly of racism, of white flight, of business’ responsibility to the community, of the community’s responsibility to itself.

Such talk is part of the fabric of daily life. It may be upsetting to be reminded so often of what that city used to be, but at least the place acknowledges what it has become.

Here, in Los Angeles, lulled by our imaginations, our heads have been stuck, like surfboards, in the sand.

Around midnight Wednesday, near USC, a Channel 7 reporter interviewed young boys in front of a burning video store that had been looted. One of them stuck his bloody hand toward the camera. “How did that happen?” asked the reporter.

“I hurt myself breaking the glass,” said the boy, his face looking directly into the camera.

Preserve us from us.

As they maneuvered amid the columns of thick black smoke, the helicopter pilots were reminded of Beirut, of the burning oil wells of Kuwait, of the Watts riots.

“It’s hard to believe,” said one. “It’s almost too much to comprehend.”

In my own neighborhood, Venice, the sirens blared through the night. Blocks from my house, where I lay in my bed, staring in disbelief at the conflagration spreading across the city, windows along Lincoln Boulevard were trashed. Car windshields were broken on Santa Monica’s Main Street. Two women reported to Channel 2 news that they had been robbed and terrorized in their Venice apartment.

Several blocks west of my house, closer to the beach, friends came home from a dinner to find one of their first-floor plate glass windows smashed. Three doors down, a house was torched.

No one slept easy.

Here is what we need to remember: The greatest victims of this violence are the ones whose neighborhoods have been trashed.

They did not “do this to themselves,” just as Rodney King did not beat himself and Latasha Harlins did not kill herself.

We need to remember, too, that the flames of devastation were not the only bright spots in our city that night.

In the midst of the nearly unwatchable mayhem, many rose above the violence. Brave people, risking their own safety, warded off attackers and took the victims of some of the most outrageous violence to the hospital. Others walked the neighborhoods, urging calm.

Now is the time to follow their lead; now is the time for courage and commitment.

We need to encourage the burned-out businesses to rebuild.

We need to put our faith in our new police chief.

We need to remember that this city belongs to all of us.

And when it burns, we all breathe the same smoke.