Can We Stop Laying Blame Long Enough to Talk Cures?

Boy, you could get your eye poked out around here from all the finger-pointing that’s been going on.

Conservatives are pointing at liberals, liberals at conservatives, blacks at whites and Koreans, Koreans at whites and blacks, whites at blacks and Koreans. Latinos can barely get a word in edgewise.

Righteously indignant law abiders point at hooligan looters and arsonists. Hooligan looters and arsonists point at the racist Establishment.

Los Angeles points at Simi Valley, Tom Bradley at the cops, the cops at the media. And everybody points at Daryl Gates.

Because we are human, we need the release that finger-pointing gives us, but ultimately, it is a meaningless exercise.

Some people have put their fingers down long enough to propose thoughtful solutions, but the angry voices of blame threaten to drown them out. You can’t open the paper or turn on the TV without hearing some amazingly specious, ideology-driven examples. I have a couple of ludicrous favorites so far.

From the right: An argument first expounded by presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater that has echoed down the empty canyons of conservative thinking, repeated by public television and newspaper pundits. They claim that the unrest is the tragic legacy of liberalism and they have made Lyndon Johnson, dastardly author of the Great Society, its poster child.

There’s some pretzel logic for you--give poor children a head start on school, give the elderly free medical care, and watch them turn into helpless and bitter social leeches. Make war on poverty, but give up when poverty doesn’t surrender fast enough.

From the left: The apologists who add to the muddle by defending the right of the underclass to loot.

I’ve heard it argued that looters should be exonerated because they are victims of society and cannot be blamed for the conditions that lead to the conflagration in the first place. Those who can defend looting with a straight face invoke like a mantra the emotionally charged image of mothers stealing diapers and milk for their babies.

Is looting any less a crime if you steal something you need?

Then again, is beating a man any less a crime if you do it while wearing a police uniform?

Those of us who are not historians and social scientists have to pick and choose among the proffered theories, trying on explanations like shoes, discarding the ones that don’t match our world views.

I gravitate toward the idea that our once-fecund cities have been allowed to shrivel under the glare of heartless federal policies. I buy the argument that when you cut out job-training programs and subsidized housing, and the industries flee and the residents can’t get loans or insurance, people get poorer and poorer and angrier and angrier. Then, when they can’t even get justice, they erupt.

So, if I had to point a finger, I’d point mainly at Ronald Reagan, George Bush and their domestic policies that have allowed the rich to get richer while the poor lose out even more.

But I’d point, too, at the lawless wretches who used the verdicts in the Rodney King case to brutalize innocents and ruin neighborhoods.

And I’d point at all of us who have abandoned our idealism, all of us who turned our backs on the less fortunate while we’ve been clambering into the next class, all of us who felt that we were somehow finally off the hook when Reagan claimed that the War on Poverty ended and “poverty won.”

With the finger pointing comes confusion. In fact, now that the terror and sorrow have abated, confusion is the dominant feeling for most of us in this city. It is what I sense in every non-expert I hear.

Last week, a black high school student said on a radio show that she felt confused about how she was supposed to react to the assault on trucker Reginald Denny. “Hey,” she said. “That’s just too bad.” She compared her feeling to the ambivalence she sensed in whites--reinforced by the trial verdict--about what those cops did to Rodney King.

How confused will she be if the men arrested in the Denny beating are convicted of attempted murder? How can we expect her to believe that we hold cops to a higher standard of conduct than street thugs? After all, that’s not what happened three weeks ago in Simi Valley.

Through the cacophony of blame, reasonable voices can be heard offering a swirl of positive, creative suggestions about what this city can do now. The voices offer detailed prescriptions for breaking the cycle of welfare dependence, creating jobs that pay enough to live on, and strengthening the family.

What we need to do is listen. So how about we give those fingers a rest?