The Tension This Time

Police shoot dead an unarmed 13-year-old, and those of us who lived through the riot/uprising that set the city ablaze 13 years ago wonder if Los Angeles isn’t again about to explode.

Me? I don’t think we are back to that flash point of rage that poet Langston Hughes once pondered. Yet.

But the conditions that helped some rioters justify throwing flaming bottles through store windows, engaging in gunfights with grocers and beating a trucker with bricks haven’t changed much.

Social critics have written hundreds of thousands of words in an effort to explain those conditions and confront the complexity of causes that ignited that blazing moment. Still, the city remains largely perplexed about what went wrong then and what is going wrong now.

I think the driving force was fear, and I know that fear still haunts parts of this city.

I grew up in the area that was then South-Central and is now thought of as Jefferson Park. Trigger-happy gangbangers left me without much expectation of personal safety, and I had no faith in the police to protect me or to serve the community.

When I left Los Angeles for college in languid Santa Barbara, I couldn’t believe how different it felt not to worry about a stray bullet flying in my direction or harassment by vicious cops. Those ever-present childhood worries evaporated and didn’t return until I went back to teach high school in the inner city.

I had never known how much pressure I was under until that pressure was removed and I could breathe the air that lucky people breathe -- air unsullied by the faint but potent scent of constant, collective anxiety about very real threats.

In parts of Los Angeles, spontaneous violence is a daily possibility. Swaths of the city are awash in guns. Honest men and women remain unemployed and poor while a drug economy thrives. Many in these neighborhoods -- including many 13-year-old boys -- simply can’t imagine that the air is fear-free in neighborhoods just a few miles away. When fear is pervasive, people get twitchy, ready to seek release in action, throw the first blow, shoot the first bullet. Fear spurs individual recklessness -- slam a stolen car into reverse at 4 a.m., why not? -- or, sometimes, a huge, collective lashing-out.

A civil society dispels fear with public safety. Enlightened policing is key to that mission. But the real battle with social malaise will take an army of dedicated social workers and empowered teachers with the skills and training to make a difference in the lives of their hard-pressed students. It will take parents who accept the responsibility of child-rearing with dead seriousness.

Los Angeles -- the whole of it -- needs a return to civic and social investment, the kind of investment we’re making in Iraq. Sooner or later, we must realize that we’re fighting for the hearts and minds of underprivileged kids here too, if for no other reason than to keep them from becoming radicalized in our brutal prisons and on our cruel streets.

To avoid another front in our amorphous “war on terrorism,” we must confront the parts of Los Angeles where people never take a worry-free breath.

Until then, we’d best hope that another tragic shooting doesn’t come on some unusually hot day that reminds us of a poem by Langston Hughes.

*

‘A Dream Deferred’

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore --

and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over --

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it just explode?

-- Langston Hughes