On the Other Hand The Riot's Context

(The following is an opinion of the minority of the Editorial Board and was written by JEFFREY S. GOLDEN.)

WEDNESDAY night's riot in the Square was no incidental marring of an afternoon of peaceful protest. Nor was it the handwork of an isolated clique of anarchists bent on wreaking havoc for reasons of sheer perversity. The number of people that became actively involved and the depth of the anger, fear, and doubt that it touched off in most of us demand that we find less simplistic explanations.

The first mistake to be made in looking at Wednesday night is confining the discussion to rational precepts. Riots are human, not analytical events. It is not enough to regret the incident's "bad politics." however much the violence might have hurt the cause of social change. The needless and deplorable damage dorie to property and people unrelated to political grievances should not be allowed to monopolize our attention. Nor do charges of police "brutality" or "restraint" lead us to a better understanding of the original causes of the event.

The primary dynamic feeding the confrontation. the one we must first explore, is a frustration that has grown to incendiary proportions. Each exercise in impotence, each powerful and "respectable" show of strength in opposition to our government's policies, has added decisive increments to a reservoir that finally overflowed. The desperate cries that come in the riot's wake for "rational discourse" become in themselves inflammatory to those who have witnessed the imperviousness of men of power to such discourse. In a very real way, these men have defined the evolution of the dissent that opposes them. The frustration that their deafness to reason engenders is compounded by the frustration of hearing them insist that only reason will work. It is a strong probability that urban riots in college towns across the country will not free Bobby Seale; it is a tested certainty that a calm explication of the shameful executive-judicial campaign against black militants has effected nothing.

This is not to say that the definitive causes of the chaos is the intransigence of the wielders of political power. Some of the targets of trashing (from Krackerjacks to Design Research) suggest a reaction against the materialism and commercialism pervading our culture. The malaise of decadent affluence, which underlies the recent history of American unrest, is too diffuse to direct blame or formulate demands. Other factors behind the riot-thrill-seeking, idle curiousity, or free shots at expensive store merchandise-are difficult to reduce to excuses or solutions. But they merely fanned the original spark, which is the product of the infuriating indifference of a power structure to moral reason and common sense.

It is difficult to sympathize with a society's indignation over broken windows and obstructions of traffic when that society's passivity sanctions a genocidal war in Southeast Asia. It is impossible to defer to principles of "law and order" that leave room for the cold-blooded murder of militant dissidents in their beds. It is unconscionable to respect a "democratic" process that is arranged and maneuvered by men whom no one elects.

No argument can justify the events of Wednesday night in isolation. Undirected, indiscriminate violence, whatever its level must be opposed by everyone seriously interested in the betterment of American society. But anyone in the larger community who condemns Wednesday's events out of hand as "wrong" plainly obscures the problem by addressing its effects and not its causes. The debate over whether or not the episode was right must be subordinated to the recognition that it was inevitable that it will happen again and again, that the plea for rational discourse will never be heeded until such discourse gains a potency that it has lacked in recent years.

To say that the incident was unfortunate is not to say that it is discouraging. The recognition of the bankruptcy of a purely forensic approach is prerequisite to finding some avenue to social change. Wednesday night may represent a spreading of this recognition, but it has no intrinsic value as a tactical model for the foreseeable future. It is a hard fact that the state currently monopolizes the means of violence, and even violent actions much more discriminating and purposeful than Wednesday's will be self-defeating.

The struggle is moving as it must, to a qualitatively different level, and the people in the streets of Cambridge are not the only ones to realize that California governor Ronald Reagan said of radicals last week. "If it takes a blood-bath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." It is to be hoped that Rcagan's omens prove to be inaccurate, just as we hope that demonstrators can channel their militance into a more cogent and solidified force. But it is imperative that each of us confront the reality of an escalating situation and eschew criticisms that stem from a futile nostalgia for a time that has passed.