The Eve of Our Discontent

Our Opinion/Extreme economic disparities are prompting violent riots

By Cindy Gomez-Schempp
Editor

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” - John F. Kennedy

As the Blue Angels tore through the air over the past week, many commented that jets sounded more like missiles. Thank goodness they are not, and that we are not in turmoil here in Fargo-Moorhead. Sometimes it feels so good to live in a small community in the Midwest. Watching the news from around the world can be frightening with each day bringing new reports of kidnappings, wars, civil unrest, famine, political posturing, and riots that are happening everywhere else.

When we speak of rioting in America, we think of the riots in Watts. We think of people who are turning over cars, police in riot gear, fires, broken windows, and screaming throngs of people. Being described as the worst in the country’s history, we think of the London riots.

We can’t compare “riots” we’ve seen lately on the news to the protesters in Wisconsin fighting for union rights. We can’t really call the protests at the Republican National Convention a “riot,” per se. Sure, we have had some protests or demonstrations in America, but they haven’t even approached what has been happening in Yemen, Morocco, China, Libya, Greece, Russia, and almost every other country in the world, it seems. Not since black people in California rioted after white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King were let off the hook has this country seen a real “riot.”

The first indication that a new wave of “riots” is already spreading into the U.S. has been seen in cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago with reports of gangs of uncontrollable kids marauding through the city, beating, looting, and raining destruction. With the speed of an internet update to FB or a quick tweet, kids are able to meet by the hundreds. Social media is taking its share of the blame for facilitating criminal activities. A minister addressing some of the townspeople at a service in Philadelphia admonished the crowd of parents to take control of their children, the situation, and their failed lives. He added the kids were an embarrassment to their race, as if race was a determining factor in criminality. And the additional racial tension of mostly black rioters and mostly white victims isn’t helping matters.

The minister, like many people on TV, is weighing in on the riots. Everyone has someone to blame. The absent parents, the shiftless kids, the media and commercialism, the lack of recreational activities, racism, unemployment, extreme privilege, abject poverty. Some believe that, just like London, parasitic and lazy people who are used to waiting for a government handout are angry that governments are cutting them off and they are taking to the streets to hold good citizens hostage to their criminal demands. The rhetoric everywhere is almost as fiery as the overturned cars, but the solutions are not quite so simple.

Some lesser reported facts about the London riots are those which illustrate the disparity between the haves and the have nots. One area where riots broke out was a mostly black, economically depressed neighborhood where police officers shot and killed a neighborhood man, which set off riots. Just like here at home, the U.K. police suffer from image problems among the mostly black neighborhoods where these incidents took place. It was also revealed that many of the public officials that were called to deal with the riots had to be flown back home from their villas, tennis lessons, and ocean side views. Increasingly, the people who can’t afford to ever take such a vacation are jumping at the chance to steal a television.

The news reports about the riots in London and in the states tell us precious little about the people involved, except to tell us we should be scared. The conditions in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods where these incidents of violence take place are similar throughout countries and history. Whenever economic depressions occur, governments cut basic services and people begin losing their jobs and homes en masse, riots and civil unrest usually follow.

Businesses in these already depressed neighborhoods, whether in London or in Philly, are the neighborhoods that are also seeing the theft, destruction and chaos caused by rioters. We wonder why the riots happen in the rioters’ own back yards? Because looters don’t get angry about their position in life and then rent a bus to hold hostage some gated community in the suburbs. When rioters freak out, they go to the nearest business in their own neighborhoods, leaving the victims and viewers confounded at the senselessness of it all.

Could we in the Midwest be far behind?

The answer is no. We’re already in the middle of it. Wars, civil unrest, political posturing, government shut-downs, rising unemployment, and growing frustration are already here. Our bridges and roads collapse. Our educational systems are deteriorating. Many governments are broke or bankrupt. They can’t pay for pensions, unemployment, and vital government services. It isn’t hard to imagine how the common person would begin to ask themselves what good the government is for. Local and federal governments keep telling us they have money for big business and bail outs, but they don’t have money to provide infrastructure or services to support and preserve basic community structures.

Reporters and pundits alike ask “why” youth are rioting, as if some brain disease has suddenly taken ahold of the youth and turned them into senseless criminal zombies. When we ask ourselves how to keep the violence that is happening elsewhere in the world and the country from coming to Fargo-Moorhead, we need to ask ourselves if we are willing to preserve for everyone in our communities a quality of life that we all want. When we ask ourselves what we can do to prevent civil unrest and violence that is taking hold elsewhere else, we also need to be willing to demand that the government that taxes us also invests in us, treating the needs of our communities as highly as they do those of special interests. We need to demand that the government, fueled by our tax dollars, puts some of those dollars back into the services and infrastructure that maintain life as we know it.

Riots and rioters are a horrifying prospect. Whether we can understand their motives or not, the actions of rioters, the animosity they create among races, the senseless loss of property, life, and fear created in our neighborhoods, are nothing but negative. But blaming the rioters alone is naive.

The truth is that if we look at every situation where riots have surfaced, there has been a long trail of oppression, injustice, and hopelessness that spurred them. With the nosedive that our economy has been in for the past decade, it should come as no surprise that the masses of unemployed, homeless, hungry, and increasingly angry people would finally give up; that disparate situations and denial of access would eventually lead people to desperate behaviors.

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