riots shmiots

The thing about riots, and here of course I mean the black riots of the 60s, is that they were just not a big deal, the property damage was all in the black area where the property is cheap, and it was a small percentage of the black people that were rioting, and looters, well there is always somebody who will take that opportunity when the law is otherwise distracted. Even the disturbances that take place after the world series or super bowl involve looting.

We had our little riots down in Champaign during the anti war period, piddly by comparison to the real riots, the most we did was block intersections. The photos of drunken college students, excuse me, valiant anti war demonstrators, following their consciences, screaming into the windows of terrified or annoyed local yokels inside the blocked cars was certainly dramatic, but all it meant was that you had to change your route to the grocery store away from campus town for a couple hours on Friday and Saturday nights.

Anyway a couple years after we ended the Vietnam war by blocking the intersection of Sixth and Green for a couple hours on a couple weekends, some kind of event on Halloween arose. Chiefly it involved college kids getting really drunk that weekend, so you can see that it was very appealing, and once the bars emptied the resultant behavior was not all that different then from what it had been back when we were ending the war.

And you know, back in those years every big city had riots. Chicago and LA had big riots, and LA is doing fine, and Chicago is doing a little better than holding its own. The cities that were in decline continued to decline, and the cities that were doing fine continued to do fine.

The riots didn’t mean shit.

Like I said before, some of the black people were proud, thinking that they had shown Whitey that they wouldn’t take his shit anymore, and maybe thinking terrified whites would pass laws to their benefit. That never happened, all they did was trash a commercial strip of their own neighborhood, and if the looters made of with some goods from the liquor store, everybody else now had to travel further to get to an undamaged one.

The white people were leaving the city before the riots and would continue to leave it after the riots. Maybe they packed up their suitcases a little faster afterwards, but not that much faster. Most all of them were leaving for economic reasons and to have a bigger back yard, but some were leaving for racial reasons, they just didn’t want to sit next to them on busses or whatever, you heard that kind of talk in Gage Park all the time. I’m certainly not saying you were among them, but you certainly heard it often.

But later on that attitude became not very fashionable, and so as not to admit it, they would say something like, oh I suppose black people are alright, and we got along with them well enough, but then they had those riots, and so you know we had to leave, for the children. It seems like sometimes it is just a way to avoid admitting to racism.

Or maybe there is a bill to raise food stamps, and we all know that food stamps go mostly to black people, which they actually don’t, but this is what people generally believe. And some white people don’t want to do it because they say we can’t afford it, and arguments can be made on either side of that, and that’s fine. But then there are always some of them who will add, and what about those riots, which what does that have to do about anything? But you know what they are saying, we don’t want to give any of our money to those black people, because remember they rioted that time, and so they are bad people and we never have to do anything to help them.

In conclusion, the riots were just a teeny pimple on the great backside of America, and I think it doesn’t have much to do with anything, and I am suspicious when it is brought up often.