UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 5 : THE PATH TO RECOVERY : Rescuing the City : We Must Start with the Children

In the week of the Los Angeles riots, a man drove his defective and runaway car, containing five children, into Lake Michigan, where it promptly sank. The man slipped out the door, but divers who were there by chance went down repeatedly in search of the children. The papers were full of the divers’ heroism, and a general good cheer spread from the fact that three of those children, retrieved unconscious from the icy water, lived--to be returned to a poor neighborhood that may destroy them more slowly but as completely as the lake would have done.

A child in the water, a girl in a well, a boy trapped in a cave--whole countrysides will mobilize to rescue that single, imaginable human being. Some countrysides, in fact, will mobilize to guide a bewildered whale back to safety. But children go under every day in the dark rivers that are our city streets. Charles Dickens makes us picture one lost child in the filthy alleys of 19th-Century London; but we do not see child after child alone and frightened, every night, in Los Angeles. We do not see, or want to see.

To see, and not to rescue, such children is corruptive of our most basic instincts. But rescue on such a scale is a daunting task. We might be drawn down into those dark currents ourselves. So we skirt them, avert our eyes, blame those caught in their murky coils. If we avoid them perhaps we, at least, will be saved.

But these are dark holes that will draw us in if we ignore them. The children are taking down our cities with them, and the police who are shoved (reluctant) into them, and our own wider economic as well as moral authority.

There is something as symmetrical as doom about this. We listen, on television, to Sally Struthers begging us to “Save the Children” in some village half-way around the world--and let our own nation’s children live only by hardening their hearts. We proudly lecture other countries on their human-rights records--and take away the most elemental right from these infants, the right to hope. We call our country the leader of the free world--while these children are imprisoned in inescapable misery. We feel obliged, now, to help the former Soviet Union address its most intractable problems--while deftly avoiding our own.

Then, to cap it all, we suffer the obscenity of our President informing us that those children are drowning in despair because we gave them too much. We passed “bleeding heart” legislation in the 1960s, gave them “liberal guilt money” that made them too soft to survive--unlike our tough, white, self-determining babies in the suburbs.

Even the attempts to help these children are turned against the children. “Old failed solutions” just testify to the futility of rescue attempts. We ask other countries to solve worse problems with fewer resources, but throw up our hands at the task of saving our own cities, our own work force, our own fellow citizens.

It is subtly paralyzing to speak of these tragedies simply as “a problem.” Rescue attempts are tried and fail when a child is down a well. We do not say the first solutions did not match the problem and walk away. Besides, saving the cities is not a thing that one approach can “solve” once and for all. We defend ourselves with continuing military plans, many of which have failed. Rockets blew up, tanks malfunctioned, dollars disappeared, but we did not think defense was a problem we could walk away from if we had not solved it by the end of a year or a decade.

Others say it is unrealistic to speak of work on our cities at the scale of a Marshal Plan. The parallel is not apt, they argue. Well, it is certainly not exact. In the Marshal Plan, we helped foreigners. These are citizens. The problems then were distant. These are at our doorstep.

People tell us they are willing to help if only someone would tell us what to do. People lie. Aid for Families with Dependent Children comes to less than 2% of federal spending; yet politicians rise to power by attacking “welfare queens.” Help to the poor is said to rob them of self-reliance; yet middle-class entitlements have mushroomed and the pressure for guaranteed medical care is greater than ever. Continual calls for help from the deprived suggests insatiability: Will nothing satisfy those people? Nobody says that of retired people, whose demands have grown along with their federal support.

Things do not “work” with the poor because we do not want them to work. Because of racism. Because we do not--some cannot--see the lonely trapped child in the ghetto. We see the lurking brute the jury saw in a Rodney G. King surrounded by dozens of armed men who could not feel safe till the 50th--or 500th--blow was dealt out.

Until there is a willingness to face the black hole in our culture, it will grow. Given that willingness, however, crash efforts, trial efforts, overlapping efforts, redundant efforts will follow, will supplement and correct and compensate for each other. That is how we address things we really care about--our own health, our colleges, our defense, our immediate families. We do not begrudge what was wasted on the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, the moon shot. If it was worth doing, it was worth the messiness and uncertainties of large effort.

It is not a problem we can solve and walk away from. Complex human crises rarely have a single sure-fire solution. Even if they did, it would be unlikely that this magic thing could be found, and support for it be mobilized, in just the right way at just the right time. A combination of efforts is usually necessary--one program making up for the deficiencies of another.

What will not work is a hands-off, cheap and remote plan like “enterprise zones.” Right-wingers like to think the market can solve anything if government can just remove taxes and regulations. Among other things, this makes it unnecessary for the rest of us to care much or do much after “unleashing” business forces. But making the inner city a place for high-risk ventures at low wages will not break down the isolation of the urban core--it will increase it. Among other things, it will not take white workers into the poor area or black workers out of it. A jobs program to restore the national infrastructure--funded from unused pension money--can do both.

When Patty Hearst was kidnaped, conservatives like William F. Buckley urged leniency for the crimes she committed under duress. He has not often been heard pleading for the children who were kidnaped at birth, brought up in circumstances far more demoralizing, more disanimating, than those of any Fagin’s den in Dickens. Buckley could imagine Hearst as if she were his own daughter. He cannot, apparently, imagine the same thing of black and Latino children who commit crimes under far more imperious influences than Hearst’s brief period of captivity faced her with. Until these children become our own, we continue to twist and distort them into our enemies--and these are enemies we cannot afford to have. If we cannot save them, we cannot save ourselves. That is the symmetry of it. That is our doom.

About This Section

The rioting that followed the Rodney G. King verdicts has set off an intense scrutiny of values in Los Angeles and across America. To explain the causes and effects of the dramatic upheaval, the Los Angeles Times is publishing this five-section series. Today’s section offers prescriptions from public-policy analysts and citizens about what we need to do in the rebuilding of the city.

The Staff for The Path to Recovery

EDITORS: Allison Silver, Dean Wakefield, Gary Spiecker

ART DIRECTOR: Tom Trapnell

NEWS EDITOR: Jon Markman

DESIGNER: Sandy Chelist

ARTIST: Matt Mahurin

RESEARCHERS: Danica Kirka, Jeff Levin

PHOTO EDITORS: Michael Edwards, Con Keyes

PASTE-UP: Michael O’Hara, Don Schroeder, Jewel Novack, Bill Lyman, Don Bloxham.