Editorials

This last week I reached my 50th birthday, a turning point in life's journey. Of these 50 years, I've spent more than 30 in various progressive movements fighting for visions of a world much better, much different from this one. Before me, my parents were activists. Now, too, my children. The circles of my friends, my comrades, my colleagues share these visions. It's in the blood, in the air I breathe, you might say. So most, I say most, of last week's events came as no great surprise.

* It was no surprise that the police in Los Angeles clubbed Rodney King into submission or that they exchanged nigger jokes over their high-tech communications systems, or that they had received the best training in the fine art of less-than-lethal cruelties. Like Nixon, they were caught by the tapes. Yet what they did, what they thought, and what they justified is not the aberrational madness of bad apples. It's standard operating procedure with big-city cops. How could it be different when we arm them to their scalps, send them into worlds of Otherness, and tell them they are entering war zones? Watts is just down the road from Vietnam. It's you versus the gooks -- they're taught to hate.

* It was no surprise when the 12 jurors of Simi Valley could see nothing but a frenzied animal trying to get around the thin blue line and into their neighborhood with its symmetrical front yards, long-term mortgages, and fragile security one false step away from an abyss of debt and downward mobility into the ghettos where they house the mad dogs.

* It was no surprise that Justice, to quote Langston Hughes, was "a blind goddess/...Her bandage hides two festering sores/That once perhaps were eyes." We are now all too familiar with the data about young Black men as an endangered species. The facts are more deadening than enlightening. Close to half a million behind bars every day. 500,000. They would have a better chance living longer as adults in Bangladesh or staying out of prison in South Africa. Count each one slowly. 500,000. Imagine a large campus filled 20 times over. It is so difficult to bring Them into our collective memory because cops and prisons are there to exclude 500,000 human beings from our imagination. And they remain out of mind for most of white America until, like too many repressed bad dreams, we awake -- as we did last week -- to a nightmare.

* It was no surprise when the rage and protests turned into a shopping spree. Could we expect anything different after a decade of deregulation and privatization, of insider trading and merger mania, of shopping channels and MTV with their commercial programming 61 minutes an hour, of Christmas lay-away plans that begin in January, of credit cards offered free to high-school graduates who can't add, of special offers on bottled desire (20% off)? Consume, burn it up, discard after use, get one free, get it now. No payment till next year.

There were no surprises here. What surprised me the most is how heavy my feet feel as we wade through the repetition of "blood and sorrow." It is much easier to deny the fact that we have lost ground, that we are even further away from the visions of equality that mobilized my generation into action: the victims kill each other, personal vengeance triumphs over collective re solve, the law of the Uzi prevails. So it seems. So it is right now. Auden was 60 years behind the times when he despaired at the "low-down dishonest decade."

But after the mourning and time to bury our doubts, we must renew our commitments and our visions. For my generation, we must add up the reckoning. As teachers we must ask ourselves, as Langston Hughes asked: Have we done enough to teach "The past has been a mint/Of blood and sorrow/That must not be/True of tomorrow?" Have we done enough to practice our ideals of equality in our everyday lives? Have we done enough to encourage our students to live their lives with conviction and daring? Of course we've not done enough. If we had, we wouldn't keep replaying in our mind's eyes those slow-motion, frame-by-frame images of a Black man lying in a circle of clubs, or a white trucker randomly selected for vengeance, or an Asian man on the rooftop of his rented, second-hand store shooting to kill anybody who tries to steal his American dream, or the woman preparing a son for yet another grave.

"And here we are," wrote James Baldwin almost 30 years ago, "at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we...do not falter in our duty now," he wrote in 1963, "we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, recreated from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!"

There is no next time. It's the fire this time.