This division can't continue

The Boston Herald

 BEVERLY BECKHAM

For a moment last Wednesday, possibility hung in the air - the possibility for change, for understanding.

You could feel it, like ozone before a storm.

America gasped - black, white America - and while the country held its breath, we were one nation, unified in our horror and outrage and despair.

Virtually no one who had seen the tape of Rodney King could understand how a jury could acquit the police officers who'd kept beating him when he was down. All of America was stunned. If reason had triumphed over rage, if marches had been opted for instead of mayhem, America might have stayed unified. A bridge might have been spanned.

Instead violence erupted - carnage, mindless, senseless destruction. Television brought it into our homes. Black gangs wilding. Black families looting. Black men beating a white truck driver.

Television repeated the same segments over and over.

And America was divided again.

So-called intelligent people got on TV and talked about understanding the black community's actions and how this destruction, this tinder box, was inevitable.

"If this is the way you have to get attention, then that's fine," some woman said. "Get it anyway you can."

These words and the pictures of Los Angeles burning, pictures that looked as if they were filmed in another country, only served to widen the gap between whites and blacks.

Now we're told it's over, it's time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The curfew has been lifted, the beaches are open, the kids have returned to school. Peter Ueberroth has been put in charge of rebuilding the city, everything's under control and we're all supposed to get back to normal.

The riots in L.A. feel like a mini-series. More than 50 people are dead, most of them black. A community has been destroyed, businesses, lives and futures ruined. Yet it remains unreal, because though television brings everything close - see the people stealing, see the man being robbed and beaten - it distances us at the same time.

They're beating a man to death. So? Turn the station. Shut off the TV. Make it go away.

And it does. It has. That's what's incredible.

For years this country lived in fear of communists sneaking up on us while we slept, poisoning young minds, controlling us. Then it was a nuclear war that consumed us.

We never worried about destroying ourselves. One nation, indivisible, with liberty for all. That was us. America was the envy of the world.

But not any more. We are a nation in big trouble. We are a nation divided by rage and fear and hate.

Listen to the black community. Listen to the music of black youth. It brims with fury - with "kill the pigs" and "burn the city" rage. Watch black movies. Watch "Boyz in the 'Hood." Everyone should see it. Blacks in inner cities live in war zones. They have bars on their doors. They dodge gunfire every night. They have no future and no way out. Things have to change.

Will they change now? Not unless we change. Black and white. Put down the guns. Give up our prejudices. Stop hurting and blaming one another, and start hearing and healing. We have to reach out, accept, understand, work together.

We aren't two people or two nations. We are one. We are all Americans.

We weren't born hating. We weren't born reaching for knives, and hurling cruel words and burning cities and killing one another. We have learned all this. And we have learned it well.

There is a civil war going on in this country right now, and this is not a ceasefire. The war continues in Washington, D.C., in New York City, in Philadelphia, in St. Louis and in our own back yard. Last week's battle was bigger and deadlier but no different from the daily skirmishes that are decimating America's youth and America's future.

The problem is we're numb to it all, to the hate, to the prejudice, to the violence, and to the reality that if this war continues, America won't.