Twilight Revisited
A slow-burning rage erupts.
Nearly 30 years ago my wife and I returned to Los Angeles from a month abroad, our last hurrah before we settled into a couple decades of parenting. We landed at LAX just 24 hours before the Rodney King verdict was announced, and having been away for several weeks, we were embarrassingly out of touch with what was going on.
The events that transpired are still hard to fathom. It was inconceivable that the jury would find the defendants not guilty. It was even harder to deconstruct and understand the many layers of racial tension that led to five days of riots. Clearly a slow-burning rage, stoked by decades of oppression and this miscarriage of justice, had erupted in violence against “others”.
It was a lot to process at the time. My wife was eight months pregnant. We lived near the corner of Beverly and La Brea, a main artery down into the heart of South Central LA. Not far from us, a photo supply shop was set on fire. We heard gunshots, and police racing up and down our street. I crawled up on the roof of our duplex to scan the troubled horizon as helicopter search lights strafed the area. It was hard to believe that we were bringing a newborn into a world so full of strife.
A week after our son arrived, I decided that it was time to come to terms with what had happened. There were…
