Rodney King, Person
King’s Absurd Question Calls for a Higher Standard of Life
“We’re all stuck here for a little while. Let’s try to work it out.”
—Rodney King
“He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”
Pieces of A Man
We want our heroes to walk tension lines forever.
There’s a good reason movie stars become worshipped icons from common attributes—you don’t see the outtakes.
But no one stays on the wire for as long as we would like them to.
Look at the life of Rodney King. He would be 57 years old on April 2 had a drug accident not ended his life on June 17, 2012.
You can say that he grew up with an alcoholic father—developed a substance abuse problem —was savagely beaten by four LA police officers in an attack captured on tape—called for peace at the helm of the riots carried out in his name—then lived the rest of his life quietly, occasionally getting into trouble for substance-related offenses, giving interviews, talking to school children, fishing, publishing a book — then dying.
King was still reeling from the beating when he gave his famous statement on May 1st, 1992 during the LA riots. At the microphone was a frightened man wrecked by self-imposed guilt who asked with a stutter if can we all get along.
It depends upon what you mean by “getting along.” Struggling through the present in an attempt to make a better future for “ourselves?” Yeah, we get along. Living in a free society fueled by mutual aid with no violent crime or guns, plenty of untreated natural food, racist free, and a focus on education. No, we’re very far from getting along. We won’t even get close.
Instead of adequate prison sentences, sensitivity training, violence counseling, and dishonorable discharge for the four officers involved in King’s beating, two were acquitted and two received 2 1/2 years in prison. 63 people died in the ensuing six day riot where $1 billion dollars of damage was done to the city of Los Angeles — while the man who had been the target of the brutality that catalyzed the riots called for peace.
All this tragedy came from an average night on the town for four cops.
Stacey Koon, the former sergeant who oversaw King’s beating, referred to the attack as “Just another night on the LAPD. That’s what it had been.”
“Can we all get along?”
A question that’s the legacy of a person
Why isn’t Rodney King’s question taken seriously?
Because it’s absurd.
King’s question is absurd because theory cannot be applied to real-life with the same outcome. We know the answer to his question is that we can’t all get along because history shows us that we haven’t—the present concurs that we don’t—and we see no reason to start getting along in the future.
This answer through demonstration is the brutal intuition of anyone who is thinking clearly and has the slightest indication of what life was like before they were born. King was either out of touch with human activity in his own time because of disorientation from intoxicants or brain damage incurred from the beating. Both of these assessments misidentify someone who lived the life of a fool.
The fool is a learned sage whose perspicacity isn’t understood by the world.
They have little or no academic training and derided intellects.
The fool knows through intuition. Wise fools are the peaceful, humble outsiders—eluding pomp and starlight, nor offered any.
Because the fool does not live to impress for his gain, they live any way they wish, or despite their wishes—even out of touch with their gift.
We know that the answer to King’s question is that we can’t ‘all get along’.
To lampoon Rodney King for his question is to reinforce the police brutality waged against him and shun the masses’ anger who protested the abject court judgement in the six days following the verdict of the offices’ trial.
Rodney King made it clear that he was a drug addict who spent most of his life losing the fight against substances. He didn’t see himself as a hero or a symbol of anything. He wanted peace.
He profited from the beating to the tune of $3.8 million, bought a house in Rialto with some of the money, and died in the pool in his backyard.
He wound up face down in his pool laced up with booze, cocaine, and PCP weeks after his book tour, two weeks after the Oprah Channel interviewed him, leaving a fiancee and a cynical world behind.
He fought a war with himself and seeked to improve the lives of others in the process.
After King died The Washington Post asked if he was a civil rights hero.
What do you think?
To call him a civil rights hero or a symbol of freedom is a further attempt to dehumanize him. It may be well-meaning, and it may be that he is as much a symbol as a man who died.
But his message was not what other people wanted it to be.
King called for kindness and advocated for faith in people. A strong line of that faith was in drug addicts triumphing over their addictions with sobriety.
If Rodney King is a symbol, we are all symbols, famous or not, for something that we may or may not realize. Just like Rodney King, we don’t get to choose how others see us.
King just wanted to live; others tried to make him out to be something that he didn’t advocate.
And it may be that King was all of the things he was called in the media and by friends: symbol, civic rights icon, and a regular man who lived as peaceably as he could and wanted peace for others.
Rodney King lived through the lampooning— now his question will endure it for as long as people inhabit the earth.
In the words of a man who knew there is a better way to live and gently nudged us toward it:
Don’t give up on anyone.
— Rodney King
