The Bond: How to Fix Your Falling-Down World by Lynne McTaggart

Author:Lynne McTaggart [McTaggart, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2016-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

SURRENDERING TO WHOLENESS

Orland Bishop appears to be on a fool’s errand, instructing young black gang members in the art of communication. Bishop’s chosen patch to spread the word is Watts, a district in south Los Angeles considered so devoid of the possibility of redemption from decades of entrenched poverty and violence that it is now chiefly known for a string of negative achievement. In the mid-1990s the street gangs of Watts formed the epicenter of America’s crack cocaine business. Such was the rivalry between the main gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, that the wars between them and their offshoots claimed five times as many lives as did all the years of the troubles in Northern Ireland. The white establishment’s solution, the creation of the special CRASH division (Community Resources against Street Hoodlums) in the Los Angeles Police Department, resulted in the largest internal affairs investigation of what turned out to be the largest incidence of police misconduct in America’s history—for unprovoked shootings and beatings, framing suspects, planting evidence, and the department’s own share of drug dealing and bank robbery.

The very name of the district has become synonymous with the most extreme face of racial discrimination in America. During the riots of 1965, set off by the arrest of a black youth and his family on a trumped-up drunk-driving charge, black residents burned and looted nearly a thousand mostly white-owned businesses. Some 15,000 troops of National Guardsmen and Armored Calvary, more than had ever been deployed on the nation’s own soil, were called in, ostensibly to prevent Watts from burning itself to the ground. “Monkeys in a zoo,” is how the LAPD’s police chief, William Parker, publicly summed up the situation, sparking off another round of looting and arson contained only when Guardsmen cordoned off all of Watts from the rest of Los Angeles like an epidemic requiring quarantine.

Thirty years later, in 1992, Watts rose again as the symbol of the uneven hand of American justice after a tourist’s video captured policemen brutally beating a black motorist, Rodney King, and the officers involved were acquitted of all charges. The court decision set off a six-day riot of arson, assault, and murder, leaving fifty-three dead, thousands injured, and more than one billion dollars in damages.

Although the murder rate in Watts has decreased since the 1990s, most attempts at urban renewal tend to wither on the vine. The riot after the officers’ acquittal, this time targeting the community’s upwardly mobile Hispanics and Asians, occurred the day after the four major black gangs had signed a peace treaty. The city’s single source of public recreation, the 109th Street Pool, required constant police reinforcement after youths attacked its manager in 2005. In the ongoing dialogue between the races in America, Watts is the place where no one is doing much listening.

Nevertheless it is here, in this No Man’s Land, that we can learn how to recover the Bond in our relationships. Orland Bishop’s work teaches rival black gang members how to relate to each other.

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