Rant for "The Field Negro"

In my other weblog life as a marauder on other people's sites, below is a comment that I just now left on one I recently found called "The Field Negro." I was responding to a post called "Quiet Riots," about the present bad economic situation for many Rainbows and whether or not this holds potentials for outbreaks like those of the 1960's, one of which I experienced, in my usual removed way.

I give this comment without comment, except to say that though that site has its virtues, its name is extremely jarring to my ear, the inner as well as the outer one. I wonder if it is a generational thing, a BIG generational thing.

Also I'm expecting the very first paragraph to be a big red flag. But I'm not worried. I'm confident of my reasoning ...and also you can't get here from there.

There are probably lots of reasons why there have been no recent Rainbow riots. (I don't apply the terms "black" or "white" to people, because doing so is wildly inaccurate, and it is a sign of laziness and habitual sloppiness in a person's thought, speech, and writing. If you prefer to be that way -- and the great majority of people, whatever their persuasion, do choose to be that way and to hang on to always idiotically saying, "black this," and "black that" -- then that is all your little red wagons. Just remember, folks, you heard it here first!)

One reason, paradoxically, is that, along with a dearth of leaders in the class of those in the great civil rights organizations of the 50's and '60's, Slick, Snick, and Core, today there is no general movement underway for such purposes as to try to hold on to what civil rights there are, or to create employment opportunities. The urban disturbances of those earlier times followed along perversely on the coattails of those far more legitimate activities, and in fact the word "riots" doesn't fully convey what those events involved. They were instead out-and-out looting and wrecking expeditions and nothing else.

If that wasn't your impression, then take another look at the outbreaks that occurred in dozens of cities directly following the assassination of Rev. King in 1968. Before that day D.C. had not yet been dragged down the garden path of ruin by the misguided with matches and clubs, as had happened in less enlightened burgs like Detroit, Newark, and New York City. Before April 4, 1968 D.C. arteries like U St., 7th St., and 14th St in N.W., and H St. in N.E. had been vibrant, mainly Rainbow communities. But after the shot in Memphis Rainbow mobs took advantage of a situation. It had nothing whatever to do with what King, Abernathy, and many others had for a long time been risking their lives and everything else to accomplish. Can anyone doubt that in fact, to react to King's sudden death in such a manner was exactly the opposite of the way he would've wanted it to be, and all the looting and burning was instead a gigantic blot on his passing and by extension on Rainbows in general. Grief, or a demand for equal rights, is oddly expressed by crapping in one's own bathtub, yet that's exactly what happened in my once beautiful city.

I no longer live in D.C. but when I left 14 years later, those important Rainbow parts of the city still had been only partly rebuilt. By contrast, I visited Hiroshima in 1959, also 14 years after that entire city had been almost totally wiped out by the first use of an atom bomb, yet the one and only sign that anything unusual had ever happened there was a memorial Peace Park in which the Japanese deliberately kept one denuded building, which had been at Ground Zero, in its wrecked state, most likely at large financial cost.

--I began to feel uneasy about the length of this comment, so I haven't given the rest of my take on why there have been no large scale Rainbow looting expeditions in the cities lately. Sorry.