A Season of Bitter Solutions

This is the season of redemption, when the earth forgives fires and floods of the past by strewing spring blooms across the hillsides, and when humans strive in simpler ways to seek new paths out of hatred and violence.

In Downtown L.A. they held a meeting, in Woodland Hills they’re planting a tree, and in Malibu a peace conference is under way.

All are dedicated in one way or another toward ending the kinds of conflicts that have been tearing us apart for years and which seem to be creating new hatreds to contend with, as though we don’t already have enough.

Even the BBC is in town trying to figure out what to do about gangs, and I, for one, am hoping they come up with a solution made in heaven.

Not that there isn’t already enough advice floating around on how to end violence in a city that seems to have forgotten what peace is.

I am overloaded with letters and telephone messages that tell me I ought to be singing hymns to the rise of armed militias, because they’re the ones who will lead us to victory in the battle of Armageddon.

And I am similarly awash in correspondence that says the real problem in L.A. is the existence of all of us Latinos who don’t have any, I mean who don’t have no, culture and ought to go back to where we came from.

I’m getting so accustomed to being called a punk Mexican that I’m thinking of including it as part of my byline. My wife calls me P.M.

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If I seem a little cynical it’s because I’ve heard it all before. I’ve been to more peace conferences, diversity meetings, tree-plantings, candlelight vigils, lovefests and hugathons in the past three years than I ever thought I’d attend in a lifetime.

I come away from them feeling pretty good about our chances of survival and write a column full of hope and rose petals, only to have it appear on the same day three teen-agers are killed in a shootout, a mother tosses her kids off a bridge and an old lady dies in a closet.

Even as I write, the news screams of murder at Universal City, of a drug addict who steals a tank and is shot dead by police, of a student beaten to death at school and of a funeral for a deputy sheriff killed by gang members.

There’s a kind of madness in the air, peaking with the bombing in Oklahoma City, which made us alert to yet another national psychosis: nuts in camouflage dungarees obsessed with wrongs being committed by government, and arming to correct them.

Through all of this, the gun lobby continues to pursue its idiotic and dangerous course of promoting the private ownership of weapons, and a gullible public continues to see it as a God-given constitutional right.

We just don’t get it. Guns kill people in whoever’s hands they are held: in criminal hands, in good citizens’ hands, in crazy hands, in soft hands, in small hands. This is not a right. This is insanity.

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It’s a strange world we live in. We’re a society obsessed with death in our news, our movies, our music and our politics, yet increasingly emotionally removed from its impact, as though a kid bleeding in the street is yet another form of virtual reality where dying is a game and pain nonexistent.

What I hear from callers and letter-writers is not outrage at the existence of violence, but a ranting against the media for reporting it; not a demand for civic government to restore order, but an insistence on the right to spray the town with gunfire whenever we feel even vaguely threatened.

You want peace on the streets? Vote in a massive tax increase to triple the size of our police agencies, pass laws to empty every household in town of dangerous weapons, boycott violent movies, stop making heroes out of vigilantes and heed the lessons of history that recall the ultimate doom of violent societies.

I hadn’t meant to pontificate today. It’s just that I’ve seen so many seasons of redemption come and go, so many hillsides aglow in hopeful new colors and so many meetings held to explore the tapestries of violence that I just don’t have much faith in their effectiveness anymore.

Until we understand the psychology of violence and renounce the instruments of violence, nothing will ever change. We’ll keep talking and marching and lighting candles and planting trees until the season of redemption passes once more, and we are forced to face bitter realities under skies dark with storm clouds of social terror.