Harold Meyerson notes that it's been fifteen years since the "Rodney King Riots" here in Los Angeles. I guess that's right, though it seems like a far more distant, earlier time.
There are three things that sometimes remind me of those scary days. The rioting didn't get that close to my neighborhood but it wasn't that far away. There were buildings burned and/or looted in areas where I often go. There was one great electronics shop in Culver City where I often bought video equipment. I drove by a few days after the rioting had ended and it was empty: Windows broken out, inventory gone. A friend of mine who also shopped there told me the following story. He said that when the rioting began, someone threw a brick through the store's front window and grabbed a Walkman or something of the sort. The folks who owned the store — an Asian family, I recall — overreacted. When a crowd gathered to see what the commotion was, the owners threw their doors open, said "Take whatever you want…just don't hurt us" and then fled. The store never reopened after that and every time I drive past where it was, or need some connector that I would have bought there, I think of it.
Closer to my home, there are two shops I often see that make me flash back to that week. One is a little convenience store that sells groceries and liquor. I walked by it during the riots and saw that it had been burned out and had its windows boarded up. "How sad," I thought…but then closer inspection revealed it was a sham. No one had damaged the place. Its proprietors had put up the boards and rubbed charcoal on the front…and when the rioting was over, they took it all down and washed off the soot. I'm not sure it was necessary but it sure was clever.
On that same walk, I went by a nearby appliance store — the place I'd bought my refrigerator and several TV sets and other goodies. People were loading some of its wares into trucks and some police arrived, thinking it was being looted. It wasn't. The "looters" were the owners and their crew, and they were taking out the most expensive items and moving them elsewhere for safekeeping…but since they were all minorities, they were having trouble convincing the cops of this. One of the officers was black but he still wasn't quite buying their explanation. Then I — a complete stranger but a Caucasian one — walked up and said, "I'm a customer of this store and these people run it." That probably shouldn't have convinced the policemen but it did. I suspect that was indicative of something that was at the heart of the rioting but I'm not sure I can put it into words.
One night, the rioting ended. I remember watching one of the news broadcasts and hearing a helicopter reporter say, "For the first time in several days, we do not see a single fire and we have no reports of anything burning." The copter did a slow 360° pan around the city from its vantage point and there were no flames, no plumes of smoke. It was over and it did not start again. The article by Meyerson is skeptical that it will stay that way but I prefer to think he's wrong…although the way the L.A.P.D. treated those protesters the other day makes it hard to be optimistic.