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The Chicago Riots Act Of Violence And Destruction

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Most people can feel bad for the people of Baltimore with the furious nature from April 18, 2015 - May 3, 2015. It’s really easy to feel a lot of compassion for the people who’ve suffered from police brutality, poverty, and injustice; even if you’ve never experienced either. Burning and looting a CVS store would be a lot harder to understand and would hardly seem to have anything to do with protesting the actions of the Baltimore Police Department. President Obama decried the Baltimore riots as “senseless act of violence and destruction.” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also seemed disheartened. “We worked so hard to get a company like CVS to invest in this neighborhood,” she said, “this is the only place that so many people have to pick up their prescriptions.” Why would anyone burn down the only CVS in their neighborhood?
The main reason, I purpose, is most likely the same reason that poor people in these cities across the country burned “their own” neighborhoods in the late 1960s: They did not experience those places as their own. Then, like now, police brutality was a precipitating cause of the violence, but it was the long-term experience of the indignities of the ghetto that gave shape to the riots. Then, like now, media outlets compared the rioters to savages who had run wild and needed discipline. Rioting, to these bystanders, was not proper political protest but the criminal actions of poor people who merely wanted to grab what they could for free. This

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