La Riots

Stephany Leonor
Ms. Acompañado
English 11, Period 1
12, December 2012

Rising against Injustice
Is it necessary to fight in order to “gain peace” and create a political change? Is violence thebest solution to solve injustices? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. argues that the effectiveness of riots are limited, because participants are aware that by creating riots they cannot win. He alsoclaims that riots do not cause a political change. Furthermore, King believes that riots actually prevent those political changes because it welcomes defeat instead. Finally he insists that it providesemotional relief to the participants, but eventually leads to a sense of uselessness because hey only destroy themselves.
I strongly agree with Dr. King’s argument that riots help the community expresstheir feelings towards political changes, but are a negative way to make a political change. I strongly agree with this claim because riots do not give participants any type of victory, but insteadbrings defeat to the community. I strongly agree with this idea, because the members of the affected community guided themselves mostly by emotions rather than rational reasons. I contend that riotsare not the best way that a political change should be either handled or created because it not only brings defeat to the community, but the message that they are trying to communicate could bedistorted and misinterpreted because of the wrong projection of the cause.
In the book twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Smith, one of the people who were interviewed, named Paul Parker, expressed hisfeelings about the riots, supporting Dr. King’s argument by stating, “It was some victory –I mean it was burning everywhere” (Smith 130). Mr. Parker explains how in the riots there was a sort of “victory”but a peculiar one, because the community expressed their discontentment with the political changes by rioting. However, the results from these were only chaotic situations in where their only...