Violence Shows Society’s Center May Not Be Holding

It was 1968, that year of perpetual social sorrow, and also the year that I came out of my slumber. I forget which particularly depressing event inspired the thought, but I can remember thinking at a specific moment that the country was coming apart.

Then, Joan Didion wrote a line in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” that has stuck with me ever since, because it said poetically exactly what I’d been thinking. “The center,” she wrote, “is not holding.”

Sitting here today, even in the relative comfort of Orange County, I’m hard-pressed to recall a time since 1968 when I’ve been as concerned about the center holding.

Come to think of it, you tell me, do we even have a center any more?

When I think back on the two great sociopolitical tinderboxes of my lifetime--the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War--I at least had the feeling that the two sides fundamentally understood each other.

Even though whites hadn’t lived the black experience and may have resisted their movement, they surely had to have understood the argument. And even though the hawks reviled the Vietnam doves, they had to have understood them, because they were in most cases culled from the same social classes as themselves.

Maybe that’s why the Los Angeles riots--and the uncertainty of whether they portend something more--are so scary.

Who are these people who torched the city and spit on the social order?

If I knew that every one of them was someone outraged by the Rodney King verdict, believe me, I’d sleep a lot better at night. That’s because I can understand how the trial, and what it represented, could have spurred some people to violence. That’s no harder for me to grasp today than it was to understand a generation ago why college protesters ransacked buildings on campuses over Vietnam. The combination of anger and political impotence simmers in a caldron that eventually bubbles over.

So, if that’s who’s protesting, I get it.

What worries me is that I don’t think that’s who’s doing it. At least, not all of it. Instead, I’ve been absorbing all the reports that a large share of the arsonists and looters and shooters are cut from a different cloth--that they’re just social misfits with no agenda other than mayhem.

Are they the underclass that we’ve been warned has been forming over the past 10 years or so, and was this their coming-out party? This isn’t a group defined by income level; it’s a group defined by the absence of any sense of social responsibility.

It’s the group we’ve feared was coming--teen-agers and even younger, raised in the midst of violence and now armed and dangerous themselves, finding solace either in gangs or the comforts of high-power weaponry that their elders of just a generation ago didn’t have access to.

At its worst levels, we’ve seen them in drive-by shootings--random, indiscriminate assaults that have no common thread other than total disregard for who gets hit. At more benign levels, we saw them on TV during the recent riots as young kids, sometimes in the company of an adult, looting stores as if it would be declasse not to.

Their own lives mean little to them, because they don’t project themselves living long enough to reach adulthood, anyway. So what value do you figure they put on anyone else’s life?

Until last week, they had largely been statistical abstractions. We’ve been reading about the profile for a few years now: born out of wedlock, marginally raised by a parent, immersed in violence either from TV or the streets that desensitizes them to it, turned on to drugs about the time they quit going to school (usually about the age of 12) and caught up in gang life about the time of puberty. Emotionally and psychologically warped. Morally rudderless.

They’re not abstractions anymore. I think we saw them on TV, wreaking their havoc, committing crimes while the police watched. I knew they were there, human residue from these many years of urban neglect, educational decline and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

I don’t know how many of them there are. I don’t even know if they’re salvageable. I don’t know if some set of values can be taught to them at this stage of the game. You see very few signs that anyone cares very much about them.

Like I said, I wish all the protesters on the street were people outraged by the King verdict. We can talk to those people, try to tell them we understand and share their anger. They may be willing to listen back.

But if it’s the other group we’re talking about--people who don’t care about Rodney King or about building a better society or about anything other than dispensing their particular brand of amoral chaos--heaven help us.

They have the power to twist the center into a thousand different directions.