CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-What started out as a commemorative event to both honor the dead, and protest his manner of dying, turned into a cashless shopping spree seasoned with pepper spray.
Not only here in Los Angeles, but in cities across the country.
What was intended as a first day of retail shopping, seeing daylight after two months of being pent-up at home, turned into a nightmare of window smashing, graffiti tagging, burning police vehicles, structure fires, looting and anarchy.
What drove the most powerful man in the world to cower in an underground bunker as protesters surrounded the White House, instead of standing in front of the cameras to help tone down the situation, was what he would later hype as a “terrorist” group. At his next public appearance, agents used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear docile people out of his way as Trump walked to a nearby church to hold up a bible in a photo-op that was condemned.
The local and national conversation suddenly turned from Covid to conflict.
The triple threat of economic collapse-caused massive unemployment, a pandemic, and social upheaval was offset by the majesty, in the midst of all this, of sending two men aboard Crew Dragon into the relative safety of space with the successful space launch hours before the looting and anarchy began.
A mission to re-land men on the moon, and then use the moon as a launch pad for expeditions to Mars, captures the American spirit; in this moment we can live in the dreams of JFK (and Elon Musk) as we struggle through the reality of Donald Trump.
Back on earth, chaos reigned, and the Trump electoral playbook was changed. He is no longer basking in an economic boom but wallowing in an absence of “law and order.” He called governors and protestors “jerks” and “scum” respectively, and also Tweeted that protestors were “killers, terrorists, arsonists, anarchists, thugs, hoodlums, looters, Antifa & others” in an amalgamation of the worst demagoguery of George Wallace and the fear-mongering of Richard Nixon.
After the civil unrest in the mid-1960s, including the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission on July 28, 1967, and charged the presidential commission with answering three questions:
What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
Fifty-three years later the answer to question three is “not enough,” despite an historic eight years of having an African American presiding in the White House.
The Kerner Commission warned in its 1968 report that “The nation was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies -- one black, one white.”
Like Trump does today, blaming the “Antifa” movement as the “outside agitators” and declaring them a “domestic terrorist group,” the Kerner Commission reported that “Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters.”
What the Commission revealed, and what has not been addressed for five decades, is the finding that “white racism -- not black anger -- turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.”
This mess will not be over by election day, nor by any single action of the president or a president-elect if we are that fortunate. It may be mitigated by better behavior, but the structural changes to rebalance ourselves may be hard and take a long time, as much as a generation. We cannot afford to wait that long.
California Governor Gavin Newsom summed it up a few days ago when he said, “We are desperate for leaders. Each of us will be judged to the extent that we do justice. Dr. King didn’t wait until he was president of the United states to exercise his moral authority.”
“Leaders can be found everywhere,” Newsom said. “You don’t have to be something to do something.”
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appears in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
