Rain, Riots and Violence
If you listened to weather reports by mainstream media “meteorologists” during the last deluge of storms, there was a sense of shock and surprise at the ending of our multi-year drought. Yet, even with global warming the long weather cycle of the state has been predicted a long time ago. It should not have come as any surprise.
It was in one of Carey McWilliams early books on the history of this area where I first learned of the 19-year rain-drought cycle of the “island of Southern California.” As he commented back in 1946, there are long dry years with little or moderate rain but then about every second decade there’s a torrent that washes down the San Gabriel Mountains and floods the lowlands and fills the arroyos and the rivers. It’s the reason why the LA River and its tributaries are cement lined gutters to the ocean to rush millions of gallons of the overflow once every generation.
Recently we’ve gotten a little smarter about capturing the infrequent rainfall. It’s just long enough for people to forget the last time or even the worst time before and for the young ones to have never known. However, if you go look up the records, it’s right there. It’s a 19-year cycle, give or take. Mother nature doesn’t use a Gregorian calendar.
Carey McWilliams’ successor as documenter of all things Los Angeles was Mike Davis the American writer, political activist, urban theorist and historian. He was based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz, Davis carried on the social justice commentaries of McWilliams into the current era. He passed away this past October.
I forget in which of his books he notes the similar cycle of race riots that occur about every 27 years here. Just long enough for people to vaguely remember the Watts uprising, or the Rodney King revolt and to be shocked when the protests over the killing of George Floyd turned into broken glass on the streets of LA.
I’m sure Davis would have described this historic social phenomenon more critically than I am in these pages, but my point here is that there are cycles both nature and human that go beyond the current news cycle, political commentary or even the self-reflection of the political elites. For what Los Angeles is good at is forgetting its history as it chases reinvention every couple of decades. It’s a collective lobotomy as we pursue the next new gold rush.
Think of the aerospace boom, the digital tech revolution and of course always the silver screen — all bringing us a chimera of the future sci fi or romanticized pasts and leaving us with the housing and homeless crisis in what is now one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest nation in world history. California is now the fourth largest economy surpassing Germany and yet it still has these intractable social-environmental-justice issues that seem to cycle and surface like some kind of natural phenomenon. Yet, they are not.
Enter the mass murders of late — 39 since the beginning of this year — and then the rise in police killings, four in Los Angeles alone. In just this last month it would seem like the clock has been dialed back to what? Probably the 1990s when homicides reached 2,589 in one year. What I’m proposing here is that like the rain and the riots, this trend in violence is also cyclical. That if we look back without blinders, and without being distracted by what’s next, we could recognize the pattern.
Perhaps it’s part of human nature, or perhaps it’s due to overcrowding — too many people into too small a space — or it’s caused by an economic system that values property over people? Is it the prevalence of too many guns, systemic racism or just the American penchant for violence? Or is it a combination of all of the above? Nobody seems to agree on the cause but we all know the effect.
Clearly, if we only listen to the daily news feed and don’t remember what’s come before we’ll never really understand why it’s happening now. And we will never understand how to fix it while we rush off to grab the next shiny object on our latest hand-held device.
The weather gal on channel four is predicting sunny skies for the rest of the week and we’ve almost forgotten the rain.