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Showing posts with label Los Angeles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Los Angeles. Show all posts

Rodney King's impassioned speech "Can we all get along?"

On March 3, 1991, several police officers in Los Angeles kicked and beat Rodney King after stopping him for a speeding violation. A year later, four of the officers were tried for use of excessive force in the arrest. On April 29, 1992 the jury acquitted three of the officers, and declared themselves hung on the fourth. News of the acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. During six days of rioting and looting 53 people were killed, thousands injured, and a reported one billion dollars in property damage occurred.

The first two days of the riots where extraordinary and terrifying to watch on TV. I cannot imagine the experience on the ground. It appeared that Los Angeles had gone crazy. Then, on the third day, Rodney King held a press conference in front of his lawyer’s office. King spoke with a purity, honesty, and expressiveness that reached out and touched all who heard him. The press conference included his now-iconic plea "People, I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids, and…it’s not right, it’s not right.” His voice breaking with emotion he went on, “…to see the security guard shot on the ground, it’s just not right because those people will never go home to their families again, and, please, we can get along here.”

Before that day, Rodney King was an ordinary man; not particularly well educated, nor well spoken, with no experience as a leader, and no training to prepare him to present an impassioned plea for peace. As I watched him on television that day, I felt that I was seeing the hand of God on earth, giving King the strength, character and skills that he needed to make his call for an end to the rioting. I tried to imaging if I would have the qualities necessary to do what King had done. Could I have spoken with such emotion that it would have touched all who heard? Would some force, call it “God,” have entered me and given me what I needed to step forward and move people in such a way?

Though the riots continued for three more days, Rodney King’s plea brought an end to the majority of the violence. By the time police, National Guard, and the military arrived, most of the rioting had already ended – presumably in response to King’s call that “we all get along.”

Sadly, Rodney King could not end his own internal riot as easily as that in the streets.  His problems with alcohol and drug addiction continued to rule his life. Yesterday, June 17, Rodney King was found dead in his swimming pool, just 47 years of age. In earlier interviews he had said that swimming was one of the only things that gave him peace.

Rest in peace, Rodney, rest in peace.
I drove from Oakland to Los Angeles on Thursday. I couldn't help thinking what a supremely inefficient way it was to get my body from one place to another. As it happened, I needed a car in LA and I was planning on bringing a large box back with me, so it made more sense to drive than to fly. Economically, the price of driving was basically the same as flying. Adding in the cost of renting a car once in LA made driving a no-brainer. However, while in progress, the process feels ridiculous. Get in the car, turn on the iPod, put on the cruise control, and turn my brain off for the next six hours.

I don't know how interstate truckers do it. Driving endlessly, day after day. One "short" drive from the SF Bay to LA makes me nuts. Driving to and from Colorado (which I have done four times,) is absolutely painful. Doing this as a job would be the third ring of hell for me.

I passed a truck on the highway that had a bumper-sticker reading "Without trucks, America stops." Its true. The amount of stuff shipped by truck in this country is amazing. The number of cars and trucks on I-5 in California at any given time of day or night is absolutely staggering.

While driving I can easily turn the cruise control on, but I can't turn my brain off; I can't stop thinking. Driving on I-5 makes me think in particular about the tragedy of the war in Iraq. The cost in lives lost and ruined, the cost in dollars, the damage to the nation of Iraq, the damage to the reputation and economy of the United States. This war has truly been a crime against humanity.

I am sure that eight years ago we did not have an extra trillion dollars lying around to spend on anything. We didn't have a trillion dollars to spend on education, or health care, or infrastructure. Where did we find a trillion to spend on a war in Iraq?

Driving down a busy, car-filled I-5 at noon on a Thursday, I couldn't help thinking of what it would have been like had we spent a trillion dollars over the last eight years building the worlds greatest high-speed train system. Imagine if we had taken the brave men and women that we sent to Iraq, given them a trillion dollars, and said "build this nation a train system that will be the envy of the world."

Think of the jobs that would have been created! The economic impact of the people building the trains, manufacturing the rails and cars, feeding the workers, housing the workers, building the train stations, making clothes for the workers and the engineers, the uniforms for the wait staffs at the cafes in the train stations, the salaries of the people manufacturing the cups to hold the coffee sold at the train station cafes... And think of the value added to our nation for generations to come! A trillion dollar train system would have instantly reduced our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic.

Instead we have thousands of children cut down in the prime of their lives, a foreign nation in ruins, an insatiable desire for oil, and a planet full of people who hate us for it.