Social Chaos and Authority (A Personal View)

In introducing the historical period of the Enlightenment, I lectured to my students about the wars of religion in the 17th century and the civil war in England. Thomas Hobbes wrote his Leviathan in the middle of that political-religious conflict. He claimed that sovereign authority is required to save us from our natural condition of being in a state of war with one another. 

This was what I witnessed in my L.A. neighborhood in 1992
(Read my brief account below)

In the spirit of thinking through the topic of order and authority in society, I want my students to write a brief post (about 300 words) describing a personal experience with social chaos and the breakdown of authority. Don't tell about something historical or something you saw via media or read in a book. It needs to come from your own life: school, family, community, etc. Describe the circumstances by which social order broke down and any chaos, confusion, or sense of danger that ensued. How did you view official authority? Were you angry at its failure to handle things or relieved when it arrived? Or, in the absence of official authority did someone step forward and assume authority? If so, how did you feel about them and what they did? Have you played the part of an authority attempting to create or restore order? Did the experience change your views of authority?

[This post will be due on Saturday, Feb 7, at 4pm]

Here is an example from my own experience:


Watching My Neighborhood Burn
The most frightening experience I had with social chaos happened when my wife and I and our two small kids were caught behind enemy lines, as it were, in our own home. This was during the civil unrest that broke out in April, 1992, following the Rodney King trial, a police brutality case that exonerated the officers and seemed to confirm official racism in the city. For several nights there was shooting, looting, and burning happening all over L.A., but especially down where we lived in an all-black neighborhood in the Crenshaw district. We had great neighbors. When a car full of angry men with guns drove through asking where the "whities" were in the area, my neighbors lied and said they didn't know. Our garage got shot up, though I was in class at the time.

My wife and I had to get back into the neighborhood to get our things because we were flying off to a wedding the next day. The police wouldn't believe we lived in the neighborhood and weren't going to let us in until we showed them our drivers licenses with our address. They looked at us like we were nuts. Until that point, we never thought were nuts to be a minority. We'd enjoyed the diversity. But racism got real for us in a hurry. Well, we got to our apartment and there was a shopping cart tipped over on the sidewalk in front of our place from a looter that had abandoned it. I remember distinctly that it had a VCR in it, liquor bottles, and a package of Jimmy Dean sausage. Go figure. That night the liquor store on the corner was burned to the ground. We made it to the airport with our little ones, nervous and wondering whether we'd come home to find an ash pile where our apartment had been. I distinctly remember worrying about flying out of the LA airport. The planes flew directly over our neighborhood, and there had been a real problem of people shooting guns into the sky in Crenshaw.

Los Angeles is a huge metropolis that manages millions of people and all of their problems year in and year out. But within a few hours' time, it turned into a nightmare jungle of violence. The police were not the solution to this problem; they were its cause. I didn't want to buy into the hype about prejudice, but in the end we learned that it takes very little for a civilian police force to be defied by an angry mob -- even when that mob is in the minority. What really keeps our society in check if this is all it takes for it all to unravel?

A week after the riots, I was back in the neighborhood picking up a few items at the corner market (which had been spared the flames). Everyone was still very rattled by the riots. Maybe I was looking tense.  A black man approached me (I was the only white guy in the store). All he did was just put his arm around me. "You doing okay?" he asked. I realized two things at that moment: no I was not, and yes, I was. A little human connection repaired a lot in just a little amount of time. Things can fall apart so quickly. Maybe they can snap back quickly, too.