Posted on 04/26/2017 4:48:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
This weekend marks 100 days of the Trump administration. This milestone also coincides with a very important anniversary. Twenty-five years ago, April 29, 1992, riots exploded in Los Angeles after four policemen were acquitted after being charged with the violent beating of Rodney King, caught on video for the entire nation to see.
According to The Los Angeles Times, 63 lives were lost in the riots, with the estimated total economic cost pegged at $1 billion, with $735 million in property damage and 1,550 buildings destroyed or damaged.
But this is more than a fact of national history for me. It is personal history. I was there.
After years on welfare, I had turned my life around after my Christian conversion. I left behind the nihilism and emptiness of the welfare state culture and became an entrepreneur and publisher.
My monthly magazine was sustained by advertising. But my operation and my customers were in South Central Los Angeles, where the riots occurred. I lost everything.
It was then, in one of life's moments of starting over, that I felt I must broaden my platform and engage and speak more publically about what I had come to realize personally. That life must be defined by faith and personal responsibility.
I saw this as the only hope for black America.
What has happened in black attitudes since that explosion of despair and violence in 1992? Despite trillions of dollars in spending targeted to help these communities and a black man being elected twice as president of the United States, prevailing attitudes among blacks in America seem to continue to change for the worse.
Remember those words of Barack Obama when he debuted on the national stage, giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004?
"There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."
It sounds so nice but, unfortunately, polls indicate that, even today, this does reflect what most blacks think. Blacks have decidedly different views than whites regarding identification with the founding principles of this country and their place in it.
In 2009 when Obama was elected, 72 percent of blacks, per Gallup, said, "racism against blacks is widespread in the U.S." In 2016, this was up to 82 percent.
Sixty-five percent of blacks, compared with 32 percent of whites, say that "government should do more," and 29 percent of blacks, compared with 62 percent of whites, say that "government is doing too much."
And, again according to Gallup, "Fifty-eight percent of whites have confidence in the police, compared with 29 percent of blacks."
In a new poll by Pew Research, 32 percent of blacks compared with 53 percent of whites, think that the Supreme Court should base its rulings according to "what the U.S. Constitution meant when it was originally written."
It could not have been clearer to me back in 1992 that the flailing violence that destroyed Los Angeles would lead nowhere for blacks. It is equally clear to me today that the attitude among blacks that their futures lie with the responsibility and money of others will continue to lead nowhere.
Despite a complicated and hard history, blacks need to trash the cynicism they harbor against this great nation, founded on the principles of freedom -- a cynicism for which they are paying the greatest price. Only by embracing the principles of freedom and self-government can black Americans truly define a new path and participate in the American dream.
We all should look to the words of Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural, "With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds..."
Lesson #1: The police are not there to protect you.
Looking back, I do believe that Reginald Denny was the beginning of my conversion to conservatism. Perhaps not PC to admit but there it is. Before Reginald Denny I had friends that were black. OJ sealed it.
Lesson #2: if the choice is between preventing crime (including assault and battery occurring under their noses) and avoiding criticism from their superiors, the media and/or politicians then police will opt for the latter.
I lived in an area of Long Beach that was heavily hit by the rioters. It was straight out of a dysoptian horror film. My take always:
1) open carry
2) band together with your nieghbors and patrol like vigilantes.
3) dumpsters on wheels borrowed from the strip mall around the corner provide decent street control to prevent ravaging hordes from entering
4)The rich are pussies and run like scared rabbits.
5) Cops are trained to do nothing and let the looters wear themselves out
my most memorable image of the aftermath of the riots was 4 commercial streets. 3 were ravaged and looted for their entire length. 1 wasn’t
The 1 street that didn’t get ravaged happened to have a Greek owned burger joint on a prominent corner. The menfolk of the owners got lawn chairs, sat on the roof, and simply popped off of few shots at any car full of hoodlooms. Their burger joint was untouched and the hoodlooms didn’t go further down that street.
They Greek brothers and cousins stood vigil for 3 days and nights shooting at anything and anyone that didn’t belong. They alone saved hundreds of small stores and businesses.
Conservatism does not equal racial animosity. I don’t question your alienation from your black former friends but that does not necessarily follow a split from liberalism-unless, of course, your friends were liberals.
The most conservative member of the Supreme Court today happens to be a black man.
I was told by refugees from Katrina a similar tale. The difference was that the shooters were Korean protecting their businesses
Yep. Saw that in Bezerkely on the 15th. They just let Antifa riot.
Never heard about businesses fighting back. Seems like a bit of a fairytale, pardon my skepticism.
Rioting savages respect only two things:
- well-aimed rifle fire
- a shotgun with a good pattern
Nothing else.
Here endeth the lesson.
Remember the running joke in L.A. afterwards?
Q: Why did the rioters pause 2 days after they started rioting?
A: They were at home trying to get their stolen VCRs to stop blinking “12:00.”
>>Never heard about businesses fighting back. Seems like a bit of a fairytale, pardon my skepticism.<<
The Koreans banded together with rifles and protected their shops from rooftops.
I saw the TV coverage.
Is the implication that you no longer have friends who are black? If so, did you think, or did you have reason to believe, that your friends would turn on you like you saw on TV?
I heard from a few contractors in NOLA after Katrina that there was some payback going on amongst and between various groups. It got ugly.
Somewhere I have a VHS tape copy of about an hour’s worth of hand-held footage of Hurricane Hugo’s 1989 ravishment of St. Croix, USVI. It really tore that island a new one and there was widespread looting in the cities. There was a one-story food market in Christiansted owned by Pakistanis. I was told that it was the only store not looted. There’s about a minute of video of about 20 Pakistani males standing on the perimeter of the flat roof of the building each armed with what looked like either AK 47’s or 74’s.
The defining moment, for me, was watching a line of police turn and run rather than face an oncoming force of rioters. This particular scene is something that I watched live, but have not been able to find on YouTube. My wife and I looked at each other, and had our mutual "oh shit" epiphany. She bought me my first gun as a birthday present later in the year.
The police in LA had no incentive to act to protect people, and lots of incentives to run. The only way to have stopped the riot would have been to open fire on the rioters. The rioters would only have stopped if there were dead rioters on the streets, and not just one or two. There would have needed to be hundreds. Any cops participating in such a mass killing could expect to be crucified.
The rioting stopped before it reached the suburbs. The rioters were smart enough to realize that, while police were inhibited from firing upon them, armed homeowners would have shot without hesitation if they felt their homes and families were in danger.
After the riots, my company opened a store in South Central LA to show our solidarity with the oppressed people. Our white President went to LA with some token black people to show he was down for the struggle.
A few years later, they asked me to produce a report of the stores that were weakest in performance (sales, shrinkage, etc). The worst store was the LA store by a large margin. I sent the report to the Director and he came back with “Take the LA store out of the report and keep it out”. I was worried the President would notice it was missing but he was blissful. The worst performers got closed.
My brother was in North Hollywood and he said the local street gang kept anything bad from happening except for the looting of a gunstore (by the gang).
I lived about 100 miles from the LA riots but I watched the local LA TV stations here’s what I learned from watching the coverage and from talking to cops and other people over the years:
1. The LA riots where planned. The media had run a campaign against the police and against the Korean community for 6 months before the they started. Tons of lies, distortion and propaganda to inflame the areas blacks. Including an edited video showing a Korean store owner shooting a black shop lifter for no reason. The full tape that I didn’t see for years later showed the shop lifter grab the store owner and bash her head into the counter top about a half a dozen times before she was shot. The Media lies.
2. The cops pulled back to just beyond Korea town because whoever planned the riots wanted Korea town burned out.
3. When the Koreans started fighting back the media urged the cops to disarm them. Half the coverage was about how awful it was that the Koreans where shooting the looters. Lucky for the Koreans LAPD was gutless cowards. Eventually the cops moved into the Korean areas to prevent the the Koreans from going on the offensive to end the riot.
In summery: The cops made zero effort to stop the riots and actively tried to keep them going by stopping armed citizens from restoring order. The Media and other powers planed riots in advance. All the riots of the 20 century may been organized this way for all I know. People in power use riots and the threat of riots as a power tool. The LA riots where not soon repeated because they didn’t achieve their goal of destroying the Korean community and have been seldom used since.
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