Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot—it will not—tolerate coercion and mob rule. Violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.



I went back to the Introduction to the Kerner Report as soon as the footage from Baltimore began to inundate all forms of media, old and new. I went back to the Kerner Report when Wolf Blitzer, on CNN, pronounced himself gobsmacked that something like this "could take place in an American city." Jesus, Wolf, the Kerner Report was issued in 1968, after two years of serious rioting in places like Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C. It was issued in good faith. It was forgotten within a decade. It remained forgotten in Los Angeles in 1992, and in Ferguson last year. It was forgotten by both sides. It was forgotten by the criminals, on both sides, and it was forgotten by the victims, on both sides. No wonder Blitzer's gob was so thoroughly smacked.

Why in the hell does this country never learn? Why does it never learn that invasion and occupation and bombing is not the way to spread democracy and virtually always comes to blowback and ruin? Why does it never learn that reactionary, militarized policing will inevitably lead to rioting, which will inevitably lead to repressive techniques that the rest of the country, watching on television, will approve? The whole world is watching? Yes, the whole world is watching and applauding every burst of the water cannon and every swing of the truncheon. The country never learns because, goddammit, Americans never learn. Dr. King was right about an eye for an eye. The country is blind.

Freddie Gray should not be dead. He didn't do anything before his arrest for which he should have been killed. He didn't do anything during his arrest for which he should have been killed. He didn't do anything after his arrest for which he should have been killed. Very few of us live in a place where you can be killed for how you are riding your bicycle or walking down the street. Very few of us understand the frustration of living in a place like that, day after day, petty insult after petty insult. Very few of us understand.

That said, the footage looks like something as savage and mindless as the earthquake in Nepal and the avalanche on Everest. The Panthers used to say that spontaneity is the art of fools. This is fairly organized spontaneity, but it is still foolish. The footage now is a mass surge into a liquor store. Night is falling.

Christ, why doesn't this country ever learn? Nothing good will come of this.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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