UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Touched by Fire / A Legacy of Pain and Hope : ESSAY : Reflections on Our Future

For many Californians, the riots were more than a momentary blip on the screen--they were a flash point for lasting and fundamental changes in their lives. The devastation left a legacy of broken dreams for many, awakened a sense of social justice in some, unleashed anger and hatred in others, and rekindled a spirit of hope among others. Six months after the riots, Times reporters visited some of the people and places touched by the extraordinary events of last spring and on these pages we tell their stories.

Figured it out yet? Figured out why the riots happened? Figured out what they said about our town, our society, our economic system? Figured out how to change it? Figured out what you’re going to do? Figured out how to explain it to your kids?

Me neither.

My problem is I’m still heartbroken. The anarchy I saw and smelled in the riot zone left me in a state of depression that only now is beginning to lift. Most people don’t see their hometowns die until after they move. This was happening in front of me, not on TV but in my face. Confronted by such concentrated evil and vengeance, I wanted only to run away and hide, and for many months I figuratively did. I was a reporter in name only. I dreaded leaving the office.

So now, attempting to grapple with the real world, I feel something of a failure admitting that I can’t fashion a concise explanation for the riots or a prescription about where we should go from here. Whenever I turn on the radio or TV, or read my newspaper commentaries, I’m surrounded by people who seem to have figured it out. Most of them insist that the riots be viewed through a single prism: It’s all about racism. Or: It’s all about welfare. Or: It’s all about Proposition 13. Or: It’s all about immigration. Or: It’s all about jobs.

Here’s what I think: It’s all about life.

We’ve been living our lives too fast.

That’s what screwed things up in the first place.

We make up our minds, personally and in the ballot booth, without enough reflection. We want answers and solutions now . We want property taxes lowered now . We condemn ourselves to a society of substandard social services with nary a thought to the day of judgment and then, when the day comes, we demand analysis now --even though the social earthquake just hit, the ground is still shaking and nobody has yet invented a seismograph to measure the cause or the scope of what the hell happened. Having gulped down instant analysis, we demand instant change. We expect Peter Ueberroth to fix it in six months.

It took a long time to dig our way into this mess. It will take just as long to dig out. The notion that “change” has to, or could, come quickly is our short-attention-span culture at its most pernicious.

Forget about change. You won’t see change on the way up any more readily than you saw it on the way down, as we variously reveled and suffered through a decade and a half of calculated trickle-down societal cancer. Tell me: Did you see the Oscar Mayer plant in Vernon shut down two years ago and watch a couple of hundred working-class Latinos lose the kind of industrial jobs that let them put their families in decent apartments? Did you see the black janitors of downtown Los Angeles gradually eliminated during the 1980s in favor of Latino immigrants willing to work for a dollar an hour less? Did you notice a decade ago that Los Angeles was already the nation’s leader in gang killings? It won’t be any easier to notice positive change.

Forget about change. Be the best citizen you can be, one day at a time. Stop writing checks to the earnest young people from worldwide do-gooder groups who come to your door at night. Send your money to that realm of good people trying to repair L.A. Drive your kids down to 5th and Main and show them the people living on the street and make more of it than a single-minded rant against drugs. Explain that some of those people are there because society deals a hard hand, and that those strong or lucky enough to survive have an obligation to the weak.

Talk about all this. Talk about it no matter how awkward it sounds. Maybe you’ll stumble onto something, a phrase or a metaphor; maybe you’ll help us invent a new vocabulary to make sense of the forces that separate us and set us at each other’s throats.

The failure of words is, for me, one of the most humbling experiences of post-riot Los Angeles. I work in a newsroom populated by some of the brightest, most well-meaning human beings in town. You’d think we would have been able to intelligently dissect the twisted slices of race and class that were fused together in April’s explosion.

Yet as we tried to conceptualize stories that would translate the public rage into socially meaningful pieces, we began to resemble a dysfunctional family in counseling, grappling for the first time with lifelong agonies. Many of us, myself included, grew incapable of conducting a reasonable discussion about such stories because the riots touched deep-rooted anger or fears that had been suppressed so long in the interest of interracial cordiality. Called upon to suddenly confront this dilemma, we broke down. Gradually, without anybody pronouncing a truce, we stopped our frustrated sputtering and returned to not talking about race. We wrote the stories we needed to write but without the personal collaboration that would have allowed us to grow. We succumbed to that cruel American denial that leaves us perpetually surprised whenever racial fury erupts. It is part of our national character to wistfully wonder whether we can get along with other races while forgetting that the majority of us live such intensely segregated lives that we don’t have to worry about it at all.

“People still can get in their BMW in Westwood, drive to an underground parking garage downtown, work all day on the 22nd floor and not understand what’s happening--why streets in some parts of town are dirtier, why schools are overcrowded,” says City Councilman Mike Hernandez, whose district includes the impoverished Pico-Union neighborhood near downtown. “People still don’t understand what happened in the riots.”

All my life I have been blessed with a job that forces me out of this segregation and delivers me into the homes of people I would otherwise regard as stereotypes. I leave these homes and return to a world of friends who know what they see on television. I wonder what it would be like if they met.

I think of my best friend since high school, a man who, if we’re talking race, would prefer to be known as Ted. He’s a white comedy writer who lives in Marina del Rey and until this fall had never registered to vote. And I think of a middle-aged black man who, for this discussion, we’ll call William. I met him on a story.

“I think most of the ‘haves’ feel like I do,” Ted said a couple of weeks ago as we drove toward the ocean. “If anything, I’m more of a racist than I was before the riots. I’m more aware of danger. I would feel like a real schmuck if I was always speaking out on behalf of black rights, knowing that if I die before I reach old age it would be because some black guy kills me. I know if he comes after me I’d feel like a jerk saying: ‘Hey, I’ve been sticking up for you guys!’ ”

A couple weeks before, I’d been in William’s den. I’d finished interviewing him, but he asked me to stay a few minutes.

“Let me ask you something,” he said gravely, the way people ask you when the world has ceased to make sense and they’re groping for truth. “Why do white people fear black people so much? Am I that different? Do you have children? Do you love them? I love mine. I’m just like you.”

The riots made only a momentary impression on Ted. “I look at it like some kind of crazy weekend from a long time ago,” he said. “Some three-day Mardi Gras kind of thing. The haves, mostly it changed their TV viewing habits for three days.”

William lives near an intersection that rioters trashed, that remains vacant and ugly. “I live here,” he says simply. “I live in the neighborhood.” He takes a box and a broom every morning and sweeps beer bottles and other debris off his street. He knows that to people like Ted, he is an abstraction or, worse, invisible. White people are as confounding to William as black people are dangerous to Ted.

Ted and William and you and I are stuck in this mess, imprisoned by forces we don’t understand, our hearts broken and hardened by history. Six months after our city burst, we are besieged by an internal pressure to achieve closure, to quantify our losses, to measure the distance from disaster to renewal, to identify the victims and villains, to punish the culprits and recompense the damaged.

But we are all victims and villains. Each of us plays both roles in a ratio calculated only by conscience. You build me a machine that measures that ratio and we’ll talk about the future of Los Angeles. Until then, my friend, don’t look forward any farther than your next step. Make that step stand for something. Be the best citizen you can be. Cross your fingers. Take a deep breath. And take another step.