Readers React: Why we shouldn’t ever ‘get over’ the Rodney King beating

To the editor: I am so sorry for reader Linda Loding, whose 24-year-old son died during the 1992 Los Angeles riots trying to save a burning building. It seems to me, and perhaps to her, a senseless tragedy. (“25 years later, Rodney King’s beating stirs emotions in L.A.,” Readers React, March 5)

Every time the Rodney King events return to public consciousness, it rubs salt into her wound, one no mother should have to have inflicted on her. She asks that people “get over” the events, as she has had to overcome the loss of her son.

What she misses in asking for people to get over the King beating is that it was not a senseless tragedy, but one with deeply rooted meaning, connected to numberless acts of cruelty and dehumanization systematically perpetrated against African Americans that go all the way back to slavery and forward to the present.

If we can’t recognize this twisted legacy, cruelty and injustice will contaminate our future as well. What is needed is not “getting over” our own losses, but the compassion to acknowledge the depth of each other’s pain.

Owen Duncan, Santa Barbara

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