Who wants to live for ever?
Crips don’t. They had no problem with Covid.
First published 14 May 2021.
The liberal left-centrists wanted everyone to stick to the rules during the pandemic because, the more people stuck to the rules, the quicker the rules were done with and everyone could get back to normal. Green ecologists, meantime, said that they didn’t want to get back to normal, because normal wasn’t good enough. We all know what they’re saying now that normality’s been regained.
The East Side Crips, a Los Angeles gang, were set up in 1969 by Raymond Washington and Stanley Williams. Washington was gunned down on a street corner in 1979 after completing a five-year prison stint. Williams died in 2005 by lethal injection after being imprisoned on four counts of murder in 1979. He was 51. Washington was 25 when he was murdered.
Twenty-five. To liberal left-centrists, 25 is barely out of boyhood. In East Los Angeles, to many, 25 is life expectancy. In left-centrist terms, Washington and Williams lived to be 85. (Only Williams’s stays of execution extended his stay at San Quentin to his 52nd year.)
Why 25? Well, all in all, these young men expect life to deal them no fairer a hand than will see them survive ’til 25, as they jostle for what position they can gain in their enclaves of crime; enclaves they often are born into and , while not exactly opting for them, remain home because of the lacking prospects of a career on the outside—Pasadena, Pacific Palisades, Downtown LA.
Like Stanley Williams, Napoleon Bonaparte also died aged 51. He’d been crowned emperor when he was 33. Not much different, 25, 33. His prime aims had been the glory of France and, with his delusions of grandeur, probably his own glory, to boot. I’m not sure how many deaths Napoleon was responsible for. But I think it was more than four.
So, here we have two extremes. Young LA males whose aspirations reach no further than their 25th birthday, which circumstance may perchance extend to their 51st; and emperors of great nations whose careers begin at that age with aspirations that stretch to eternity, despite what intervening circumstances might do to curtail that expectation (but, in Napoleon’s case, probably didn’t).
So, back to the rules: those we can group together as liberal left-centrists wanted those to whom we might assign the label LA Crips to stick to the rules, so that the rules would be done away with. And then what? Well, a return to normality, or to the normality that the Greens wanted us to return to, if so it must be. And, is there any more place for the LA Crips in that normality than there was in the normality we had before it was swept aside by Covid? In short, no. And, more to the point, the LA Crips’ normality was anything but swept away by Covid. It’s pre-Covid normality that the well-to-do looked forward to, because it promised them their well-to-do future, their golden age, and bouncing grandchildren on their knees—the grandchildren for whom they’d struggled, studied, sweated and sacrificed their lives long.
For a Los Angeles Crip, life expectancy is 25 years.
For the well-to-do middle class, life expectancy extends to their future legacy—they live on, in the lifetimes of their grandchildren.
For emperors, their legacy’s life expectancy, and therefore their life expectancy, extends to eternity.
Back in school we’d get collective detention. Those who needed to get away for a rugby game would mutter in dissatisfaction at the unruly louts whose shenanigans were extending the detention past their kick-off time. But the louts were unruffled: they had no rugby game to go to. They had nothing to go to. So why should they give up their shenanigans for a subgroup among them that wanted the rules adhered to, just so the louts could be simply forgotten again, once they’d played their cooperative role?
If more were done to show the Crips, the louts, those in prison, the poor, the social minorities, the hopeless how much better the normality that we want to return to would be for them, then that’s how we would accelerate the emergence from disasters. But, instead of levelling up, the answer we so often get is to eliminate those whose levelling up is seen as a burden with no benefits. The only answer to that is levelling down: revolution.
Revolution is what comes when the LA Crips ask, “Who wants to live for ever?”