People Post is a space for opinion pieces, letters to the editor and guest submissions from members of the Long Beach community. The following is an op-ed submitted by L.S. Pearce, a Long Beach based therapist and clinician, with a lifelong passion for supporting human rights, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Long Beach Post.

Editors note: This opinion piece contains language some readers may find objectionable.

I was 12 when the Rodney King riots happened. A group of cops was seen on tape beating a black man senseless, and for maybe the first time white America got to witness for itself the disparity between black and white policing and get a glimpse of the divide that not all men are equal in America.

It was something people of color had been saying for 100 years and no one was listening, or maybe nobody cared. And so when the cops were acquitted, the rage bubbled over. I lived in Long Beach at the time and I could feel the tension in the air; I remember understanding in my adolescent way that something important was happening, something I wanted to be a part of, but knowing I was too young to be out in the streets with the adults.

That was almost 30 years ago, and its true what they say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Were seeing a particular story emerge as the media attempts to control the narrative, the same way they have with BLM, with Occupy, with the WTO. Newscasters keep referring to the protests as violent, which is a dangerous tactic to demonize protesters, in order to legitimize the eventual use of vicious and abhorrent force that the cops and National Guard will visit upon citizens.

Lets get really clear about something: Property damage is not violence. Violence is what you do to another human being, a living thing, not an inanimate object or a bunch of drywall and bricks in the shape of a building.

Violence is kneeling on a mans neck for 9 minutes while he begs for his life until he dies.

Violence is bursting into the wrong apartment in the middle of the night and gunning a sleeping woman down in her bed.

Violence is shooting a young man with a cellphone in his grandmothers backyard, or a little boy playing with a toy gun.

Violence is shooting a man while he livestreams it, and then joking on video that hes going to need a closed casket.

Violence is 400 years of slavery and rape and whippings and public mutilations that were so commonplace and accepted by society that they were the subject of postcard photos, with a hundred white people standing around smiling and taking an ear or toe of the murdered person home as a souvenir.

Violence is a 150 years of Black Codes and lynchings and Jim Crow and a criminal justice system that targets people of color and ruins families and lives.

You cannot do violence to things. Violence is what you do to people. And so far, I have not seen citizens attacking each other; I have seen them attacking the symbols of their own subjugation: police stations, banks, corporations, the media. And when you decry the violence of smashing a window with the sameor moreferocity than youve decried the brutality and murder of your fellow citizens for hundreds of years, you demonstrate to the black community, to your peers, to your family, to God, that you value insured property that isnt even yours more than human life. Personally, I dont give a fuck about a Starbucks. Burn it to the ground in the neighborhood it gentrified.

A few years ago I read about an epidemic of elderly people choosing suicide rather than homelessness when they have to choose between medicine and housing. Unless something major changes financially in my own life within the next 30 years, Ive gotta be honest, suicide is my retirement plan too. Boomers can turn a blind eye as they enter their golden years, but our generation doesnt harbor any illusions about the grim reality and futures we face. We inherited a dying planet and a nation being constantly plundered by politicians and the companies that own them.

Most of the people of my generation will never be able to buy homes or start families, and we will never be able to retire, working to support ourselves until we literally drop dead. Deaths of despairdrug overdose and suiciderun rampant in economically depressed areas; not just urban centers, but rural communities where coal mining or factory jobs have disappeared.

Mental health problems are on the rise even for people doing well by societys standards, with 1 in 6 Americans being prescribed a psychiatric drug. Wages have been stagnant since the 70s, weve been working harder and longer hours for less and less while the CEOs take home ever more astronomical salaries as they bust unions, automate our jobs away or send them overseas.

The fifth of our earnings removed through tax money rarely goes into infrastructure, education, healthcare, taking care of the elderly, homeless, or veterans or building up our communities in any way, but instead to offset an endless parade of tax cuts and bailouts for the rich, to fund the surveillance infrastructure of our own enslavement, and endless wars to dominate and exploit the resources of other nations. Its been getting worse and its only going to keep getting worse for as long as we let it. And if at this point you cant see any of this incredibly large and legible writing on the wall, well, Id have to question your intelligence. And if you can see it but want to continue to champion a dog-eat-dog system of selfishness and murder and environmental degradation and wage-slavery on the hope of that 0.00000001% chance that you will one day join the 1% and get your own turn at the enhanced exploitation of your fellow human beings and the natural world, well, I would certainly have to question your morality and indeed, your humanity.

This system is sick and evil. That is not to say that we as individuals are evil. Nevertheless, we passively participate in evil every day whether we want to or not. We fund the wars, we buy the cellphones containing materials that were mined with child labor and made in sweatshops so terrible that the companies put out suicide nets. We stand by and film the murder of our neighbors by police because we feel powerless to do anything else. But the truth is, there are other ways. Those ways may be uncomfortable to get to, but are we comfortable now?

In reality, nobody with power ever willingly surrenders it; you take it. America was founded on taking what was not given by the British Empire: our independence. Every meager scrap of human rights has had to be fought and scraped and in some cases died for: womens rights, gay rights, labor rights, civil rights, disability rights. And that fighting and scraping and dying has not been pretty; it has not been warm and fuzzy. That is what we are experiencing now: the discomfort of change, of growth. There is enough on this planet for everyone if we distribute it more equitably rather than allowing 1% to hoard almost 50% of the worlds wealth, and it can be had in ways that dont destroy our own habitat. We just have to decide that enough is enough and were willing to fight for it.

So when I hear people complain about the riots or rather, the REVOLT I hear people crying But why would you burn down your own plantation?! White people, rich people, you are on this same sinking ship, you just have better seats. The poor and the people of color will go under first but it wont be long before you too are thrashing about in the icy sea that will snuff out your life.

Just how long do you think your skin color will protect you when you lose your job in a failing economy, and become one of the desperate dispossessed that the police have free rein to brutalize when you do whatever you need to do to feed your family? Just how long do you think money will isolate you from the ravages of a crumbling society on a dying planetexactly how much money will you need to pay your armed guards to save YOU and YOUR RESOURCES instead of saving their own loved ones?

We can come together, now, while we still have a chance to save ourselves and the whole damn world. Or we can descend over the next two decades into madness and chaos, tearing at ourselves and each other while the world burns around us.

This is nothing new; civilizations have fallen here and there into periods of chaos and destruction throughout time. The only difference is that now we live in a global community and so this time, it will be a global collapse (consider the virus, spreading rapidly around the world and all the shortages and supply chain disruptions it brought, as the dress rehearsal). The only difference is that now the planet is getting hotter and the waters are rising and the land is less farmable and the species we rely on to survive are going extinct.

I am personally very happy and excited that people are rising up and I hope it continues. Because I recognize that Kali is the goddess of both destruction and creation. You cant build a new home until you raze the old one; you cant plant your crops until you till the field. Our society is sick. Burn it all down and lets build something new.

I believe that within the next 30 years, we as individuals will either witness or participate in a fight to the death. Either we will crush this system and crush capitalism, or the system and capitalism will crush us. If we win, we dont know what will happen. Maybe the fault is in our stars and humans are innately terrible and we can never create anything better. We would certainly be stepping into the unknown and that is scary. But if we fail, we do know what will happen: The whole world will perish.

The rest is here:

Opinion: Why the rage? Some words about violence and human rights - Long Beach Post