“Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King was widely quoted as asking in May 1992, as riots raged in Los Angeles, in part a reaction to his beating at the hands of four police officers after a high-speed pursuit and those officers being acquitted of charges related to that beating – at least initially.
Eventually, Feds would roll in and send the offending police officers to prison. King, a serial drug and alcohol abuser and traffic offender, later would come away with a $3.8 million settlement.
King drowned in a swimming pool on Father’s Day 2012, with alcohol, cocaine and PCP in his system considered to have contributed to it all.
One of the victims of those race riots was truck driver Reginald Denny. His crime was being white and in the wrong part of Los Angeles. For that offense, Denny was dragged from his truck by rioters and beaten, even having his head bashed in with a cinderblock.
Four rioters eventually faced trial for the assault and only one did any hard time, the others having had charges downgraded or outright dismissed.
Denny, who suffered a fractured skull resulting in a speech impairment and difficulty walking that required years of therapy, sued the City of Los Angeles, and lost.
The police were wrong in their dealings with King, and paid a price with their freedom. LA paid a big price in monetary terms, too.
The rioters who beat Denny were wrong. They virtually got away with it, as did Los Angeles.
All these years later, many continue with the plaintive “Can’t we all just get along?”
Just today (Monday, March 11, 2024) I watched a lengthy youtube video interview with famed demographer Neil Howe, he of the generational “turnings.” If you want to watch it yourself and have an hour or so to kill, just get on youtube and search for Neil Howe and wealthion and March 2024.
Highlights I took from the video are that Howe is concerned about all the division in this nation and the willingness of people to consider balkanizing the country into pockets of right or left leaners.
Howe spoke of civil wars. He also spoke of economic downturn and stagflation, the economic ghost of the 1970s when we suffered from economic stagnation and high inflation.
The good news from Howe is that his research indicates bad times eventually give way to better as successive generations return to basic principles.
But Howe is concerned about the inability of the citizens to get along.
Even as I was finishing up the Howe video, I saw a promo for Chris Cuomo doing a one-on-one interview with Tucker Carlson on Cuomo’s current fringe cable news outlet.
As lead-in, Cuomo (Fredo), who got drummed out of his previous CNN job for shilling for older brother Andrew, the former governor of New York, sounded a lot like Rodney King. Cuomo, formerly an adroit left-wing hatchet man, now just wants to have conversations and get along, even with enemies such as Carlson, the former Fox anchor.
I tried to watch Cuomo and Carlson, but got overwhelmed by its saccharine tack.
It’s a good concept, smoking the figurative peace pipe, but one that isn’t going to fly circa 2024. The divide is too great and the issues too stark.
We can’t all get along when we have a president more intent on apologizing to an illegal immigrant alleged murderer than to the victim’s family.
We can’t all get along when Donald Trump routinely is demonized as Hitler II and his supporters are called names, including “deplorables.”
We can’t all get along while both sides – the lunatic fringe left seems to have an abundance of offenders – cannot stick to facts and dispense with the ad hominem hyperbole.
We can’t all get along until people are able to be honest, both publicly and privately, and willing to use their heads to criticize people who are just flat out wrong, whether they are in their group or the opposition.
After Cuomo was done playing nice with Carlson, he and another talking head from his cable network had a post-mortem and got in their obligatory shots on Trump, Carlson, Putin, et al.
And that’s why we can’t just get along.
Sam Ross Jr's site 