Echoes of LA riots in FEAR THE WALKING DEAD
The first two episodes of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD have really haunted me even though none of the characters we are supposed to care about have been killed and/or turned into zombies, and I couldn't figure out why.
Then I realized: I lived through this.
I lived in downtown LA during the LA riots, in an old hotel USC had converted to a dorm.
I had been playing tennis at the beach with a friend when we saw the riots start on TV, so I figured I'd better get home. Driving back to downtown LA, I saw fires on both sides of the 10 freeway.
From the roof of our building, we could see smoke from fires to our east, south, and west, East LA, South Central, Koreatown respectively. That is, we could watch them until a cop came into our building and told us to get off the roof or they would shoot us.
Some people in the dorm were talking about getting the hell out of town going north, but someone said they heard there was a sniper on the freeway north, so no one was leaving until things settled down.
At one point, a cop caught a looter at a Foot Locker we could see from our building, and instead of throwing her in the back of the squad car, he handcuffed her to iron fence around a tree and drove off.
FEAR THE WALKING DEAD is set in a neighborhood just past Koreatown.
On of the resident advisors in our dorm was from Beirut, Lebanon and said it was just like back home, but he didn't seem any less disturbed than the rest of us.
Like in the show, the police seemed overwhelmed, ineffectual, and at best, not necessarily on our side, especially your skin was darker than a paper bag.
The second day, a couple of my friends and I decided to drive around town and see what was going on. Looters at Pep Boys, an auto parts store, ran in front of my car with a set of tires. We saw building burning across the street from the USC campus, and train of cop cars screaming down the street in a row. Ironically, we saw the biggest police presence in Beverly Hills and nothing was going on there. We went north to the Valley, and people were lined up out the doors of grocery stores stocking up for a long siege or a getaway (even though there didn't seem to be any violence going on there).
Unlike the show, all of it was covered on TV, we knew what started it (cops beat the crap out of Rodney King on film and were acquitted), and it came to a definite end around the time troops showed up.
And the violence was not done by zombies, but was at least started by people who realized the acquittal meant they could be killed with impunity by the authorities who were supposed to protect their lives, and they would have no recourse in the legal system.
That virus is still alive today. We see it every time the cops shoot and kill an unarmed black kid, choke out a black guy for selling loose cigarettes, or arrest a black activist for pulling over to get out of a cop's way without signaling.
Somehow, the public doesn't erupt into chaos and violence on the scale of the Los Angeles riots.
Because the public hasn't reacted that way, we see the virus isn't them or in them. The virus is in our society and those we trust with authority.
All it will take for the facade of civilization to break down is video of a couple of white middle class teens and white loose cigarette sellers getting killed by cops too and middle and working class white people realizing that those who control the cops don't value the lives of any race if they get in the way of their control and profit.
We already live in the world of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD. We just don't know it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was actually "commissioned" (i.e., "we'll perform it, but of course there's no money to pay you"
to write a short play about it, way back then...
Well done. 
