Riots Are Violence

And will the burning ‘forests’ grow back?

t’s weird that this needs to be said, but here we are.

Then again, the pundit who reprehensibly claims that destroying property “is not violence” risks nothing. She agitates for revolution from the safety of her apartment. Much the same, I suspect, most of those excusing the destruction of our cities — either contending that businesses “have insurance” or peddling false choices about life being “more valuable than property” — have never built a business themselves.

Nor have I. Yet, I do know that having a business destroyed can be devastating, and “having insurance” won’t make victims whole. My parents were immigrants from Hungary. My father, who’d worked as an industrial chemist in the old country, ended up in New York’s jewelry district in the 1970s learning how to set diamonds. Learning a new craft takes patience and hard work. My mother, pregnant with me and unable to speak much English, would take the F-train from Rego Park to Manhattan to bring home necklace-beading work.

Like millions of Americans, after years of plying a trade, saving money, and taking out loans, my parents opened a small business in a strip mall in the suburbs. As a kid, I often walked the mile and a half from my elementary school to spend time at our small jewelry shop. I was no different from the kids in the neighboring liquor or Chinese food stores, where parents toiled away for endless hours. In those days, it was more common to see children helping out in family-run businesses, or at least that’s my recollection.

One day — on a half-day of school, as my luck would have it — our shop was robbed. The fact that the strip mall was situated on a busy road, or that it was the middle of the afternoon, didn’t deter the thieves. Three men, two inside and one outside, pulled out guns and demanded the combination to the safe. They cleaned out the place.