On Sunday morning, I picked up one of the Toronto daily newspapers. I saw images of city towers tumbling, apartments smouldering and people wandering aimlessly in the streets. Two days later, I watched breaking news on TV and I saw a dishevelled downtown, stores smouldering and people wandering in the streets.
The first disrupted city was Kathmandu, Nepal. The second was Baltimore, Maryland, in the east-central U.S.
Did it occur to anybody else that civil unrest looks a lot like the aftermath of an earthquake? And I don’t just mean in terms of rubble, although there’s a remarkable parallel there. If the debris on the streets of Kathmandu was once your home, the rubble of an earthquake would certainly feel devastating. If the wreckage strewn about the roadway was once your business (such as that pharmacy or department store looted and set on fire by angry mobs) in Baltimore it would also be pretty devastating.
And in both cases, it seemed there was little anybody could do to fix things. In Kathmandu, with little access to appropriate rescue equipment, residents clawed at the rubble with bare hands trying to find survivors. And in West Baltimore, the police could do little to dissuade mob violence that propelled bricks through windows, set vehicles alight, and drove many to loot randomly.
Chaos looks frighteningly similar, whether it’s the product of people gone mad or nature gone mad. Truth is in either case little can alter or prevent the madness.
My mother and sister lived through the earthquake in Los Angeles over 40 years ago. A number of quakes had occurred along that California fault line before; and that day – Feb. 9, 1971 – my parents’ house in the San Fernando Valley was just a few kilometres from the epicentre. There were 64 people killed; damage amounted to half a billion dollars; and it all happened in less than 15 seconds. I’ll always remember how my mother described her attempts to get out of bed that morning, then find my sister to ensure she was safe.
“Moving along the hall was like trying to stay upright in the corridor of a ship caught in a storm,” she said. “I kept falling down and ended up crawling to her room.”
While I wasn’t there for the main event, I arrived soon after and I remembered flinching every time I felt a slight tremor in the house. By that time, my mom and sister had become pretty blasé about such things and just said, “Oh, it’s just another aftershock. Nothing to worry about.”
On the other hand, I was a lot closer to the sociological tremors that last hit Baltimore the 1960s. Members of my family had moved to Baltimore in those years to take over a popular restaurant. While their eatery was some distance from the downtown core, my aunt and uncle recognized that their African-American neighbours were living in sub-par housing, coping with scarce employment opportunities, and being tarred by the brush of high crime rates. Civil rights activism had focused attention on less fortunate communities of the downtown cores of many American cities. And rioting had occurred regularly in Detroit, Washington, D.C., and the south Los Angeles neighbourhood of Watts. Black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin put it this way in 1966:
“Watts … marked the first major rebellion of Negroes asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”
I remember my university classmates and I travelling to American cities to find out for ourselves what this was all about. That same year, 1966, I worked in my relatives’ restaurant, on the kitchen staff, which was mostly African-American. I stocked shelves, bussed tables and washed dishes along side black Americans from the inner-city neighbourhoods of Baltimore. It was easy for me to see how those involved in the 1960s riots felt dispossessed, disenfranchised and disgruntled by the poverty of their lives versus the relative affluence of non-black Baltimoreans.
Back then the riots were about deprivation. Today they reflect a perception by black Americans that their police are racist, their municipal governments pay lip service to their poverty, and their justice system will never convict a white man of a capital offence. Following this week’s riots over the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in the custody of Baltimore police, President Barack Obama condemned the violence. He said those who took advantage of the street riots to loot and burn needed to be treated as criminals. He added that American cities will have to make difficult choices on education, criminal justice reform and economic investment to fix the problem.
“That’s hard,” Obama told reporters. “It requires more than just the occasional news report or task force.”
And these days the only task forces we take seriously are the ones we send to earthquake zones to clean up debris and search for victims in places such as Nepal.