Tortured and tormented by others,
and from within by the drink.
No saint,
but Rodney King left us
with a saintly saying,
so plaintively spoken,
I can hear it still.
Can we all just get along?
Regardless of all else,
all twists and turns,
his plea is the prayer
many of us pray, still
and yet and ever.
Can we all just get along?
Truly may he rest now
in peace.
Truly in true peace.
And may we all do acts
to fulfill his plea.
CODA
Rodney King, age 47, was found dead in swimming pool. At this time, the circumstances surrounding have yet to be determined.
Long ago when he was 27 years old, he and companions were stopped on the road. He was loaded, not with pcp as is often wrongly bandied about, but with overage of alcohol, and minute traces of marijuana. He giggled and acted foolish by waving at the overheard helicopter, patting the ground. Four police officers converged on him, jumped him, and tasered and beat him with night sticks, their fists and their feet. He suffered devastating damages to his body and spirit, broken bones in face, legs, skull fractures, kidney damage and onward.
The four officers were tried by the state of California by a jury of ten Anglo persons, 1 Latino and 1 Asian. All four officers were acquitted.
At this verdict, the Governor of California, and the then President of the United States, Herbert Walker Bush and family, firmly and loudly expressed incredulity that an acquittal could be a reasoned result.
Why? Because a resident of a nearby complex had filmed the entire assault on Rodney King, and the lights of the street were very bright and caught every blow and especially every enraged blow after Rodney was clearly subdued.
But it was too late… Many Los Angeles populace, fueled by the deep injustice they just witnessed in the jury’s verdict– one more black man not receiving justice EVEN WHEN there is a long film to prove that he has been beaten to a bloody pulp by four enraged men… LA erupted in riots and fires that left 53 persons dead…
This is part of the reason Rodney King’s saying “Can we all just get along?” is poignant still. When one watches early films of Rodney King, he seems a genuinely bewildered soul, in no way hardened, but very hapless, very addicted to drink, and very without minimal best judgement even about himself, and others.
Some say, he had no civil rights, because he is just a drunk, a pot smoker, a robber, a trouble magnet, and later, a rags to riches can’t keep it together. (LA paid RK 3.5M to settle lawsuit against the city for assault, though trust, that some say, thereby he ‘lucked out,’ money cannot fix what Rodney suffered in and of himself, nor what he suffered at the hands of four men unleashing their brand of brutality. We know from refugees and wrongful death settlements that money is no cure for atrocities that have been visited on the real human). And they’d be accurate, though such assessment would be partial, for it leaves out the soul and spirit of the person.
But they would be dead wrong about Rodney King not having civil rights. All people have civil rights, even those who make grievous errors in the past or present. All persons have a civil legal right not to be physically beaten beyond recognition, not to be beaten at all, ‘just because’ –whether at Abu Ghraib and other ‘institutions’, in mental health facilities, orphanages, in round ups of the young for trafficking, or any elsewhere those intent on damaging others plays itself out unrestrained.
The Rodney King beating and egregious assault case does not die because Rodney has died. It lives on as profound insight for those with the eyes to see it, those with the ears to hear it– about not just all blather about who is bad, who is good, but about impulse control regarding civil rights of others–not just in those who are addled by alcohol– but control of base and destructive emotions, the drive to punish swiftly and unjustly and without due process, in all others. All.