After the Rodney King verdict, when I witnessed rioting in Los Angeles

The news reports and commentaries on the death of Rodney King stir a whole lot of memories.

As a starving graduate student at USC, I lived quite close to campus, which is not any hot piece of real estate.  After living in an apartment complex that was only a few blocks of a walk to the campus, I moved to significantly cheaper housing more than a mile away.  I didn't understand, until much later, that it was also a drug-crime infested area; oh well, that is a story for another day!

There were many moments when I used to wonder how the neighborhood I lived in could possibly be there at all in the phenomenally rich country that the US is.  Of course, a trip to New Orleans and walking through some of the neighborhoods there quickly straightened me out: my LA neighborhood was much better than some of the places I saw in LA's New Orleans.

To cut a long story short, the rioting took on crazy dimensions.  People in buildings up and down the street were rushing here and there in their pickups and cars and coming back with shoes, tires, television sets, and anything they could lay their hands on.  One guy told me to go to the Pep Boys store that was round the corner and grab whatever I wanted.

The building manager, who was a Japanese-American (his stories will be for yet another day!) advised me, in his halting English, that I should not even peep out of the window.  I thought it was good advice, and turned the TV on.  Every local channel was covering the riots big time, and then in one I saw my neighborhood.  A view from a helicopter above.  I could see my own building.  That was when the seriousness really hit me. 

Two days or so later, when things had calmed down enough, I biked down the usual path, on Hoover, to the campus.  Odd shoes were scattered all along the road--people were rushing that they couldn't be bothered to stop and gather the spills, I suppose.  I passed the Pep Boys store, which had some awful black coating from the fires. 

I reached the campus, where the perimeter was heavily patrolled by university and city police.  I remember trying to talk to one officer, who simply brushed me off. 

The entire riot was surreal.  But, even more surreal was the original event--the beating of Rodney King, which was captured on camera.  It felt to unreal that real cops would really beat the crap out of a guy like that.

As the riots continued, I do remember watching on TV Rodney King uttering those now famous words: "can we all get along?"

It was so profound.  Such simple words with such heavy weight in those dramatic moments.

A few months after that, I think, when I was an intern at a public agency in downtown LA, I was one of the few people who rode the Long Beach Blue Line in its trial runs, and when they were filming publicity campaigns.  From the train, I could see the Watts Tower and I was reminded of the narratives I had read and heard about the riots in the 1960s.  Another reminder that even as things change, they remain the same?

A few years ago, I drove by those old haunts. Every building, including the apartment complex where I lived, looks so much more spruced up and bright than ever.  Perhaps no more riots?  Wouldn't that be an achievement?