I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today, and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.
Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States. In effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.
When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents. Every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.
He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.
When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often, he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings that housed his office.
There was no violence.
I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind. It would be unsafe and unwise to attempt that today. That peacefulness continued until the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.
In 1960, I was in London, covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no fear or concern for my safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes enquiring whether I needed company.
At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.
Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.
I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure the gas was turned off in a printing plant that belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere, and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.
By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.
I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.
When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.
There was still a kind of social peace, a respect for one individual for another.
Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.
About the U.S. Capitol: In 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and walk in.
I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question that I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a global reality?
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Good Morning Mr. King:
I was hoping to find an email address for you to send my message to, it looks as if this will have to do. I recently read your piece “Glimpses of Times When There Was More Respect, Everywhere” in my local newspaper, The Daily Independent in Sun City, Arizona, and while reading it was immediately struck by a series of similarities between what you wrote about your youth and my own. You ended your opinion piece by asking the question how did we get this point of global criminal rage and I was intrigued by it, so thought I’d take a stab at answering it. But first those similarities. Like you I spent most of the 1950s in an ex-British colony, in my case, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. At that time the rate of violence was so low that the police did not carry guns. My brother and I ended up at the docks in Colombo at midnight on New Year’s Eve to watch the fireworks set off from the ships. Nothing happened to us. We did learn later that two people were murdered on the docks that night, but not us. Later, while in the Peace Corps in Belize I was clomping along a jungle road with two other volunteers when a Range Rover pulled up next to us and asked if we wanted a ride. It was the Prime Minister, George Price, the car being driven my his nephew. We hopped in. A few miles down the road two men stepped out of the jungle, one with a shot gun. Mr. Price told his nephew to stop by them, which he did, and the PM chatted with them for a few minutes, then we drove on. I said to Mr. Price something like “In America the President does not stop and talk to men with guns” and he just laughed and replied that in America those people would have been cleared out long ago. Okay, now to your question. I believe that the rage experienced in the United States and around the globe is caused by income disparity. In the US we came out of the 1950s thinking that middle class prosperity was going to be a given from then on, while in much of the rest of the world folks believed that throwing off the yoke of colonialism was going to lead to greater well being for all. Neither proved to be the case. Rather than the good life for all the ensuing decades brought about the proliferation of the mega-rich. In 1987, when Forbes first started tracking billionaires, the Top Ten consisted of 6 Japanese and four others from four different nations. No Americans. Now there are close to three thousand billionaires, and the only country with more of them than America is . . ….Communist China. I’m sure that the irony of that does not escape you. Meanwhile everyone else in the world gets to watch this happening and many of those people feel that those acquired riches are being done at their expense and this makes it seem that violence is some sort of an equalizer. Also the use of violence has proven to, at times, be the voice of those whose voices can not be heard.
This is already too lng, so I will stop.