COMMUNITY ESSAY : For Some, the Horizon Was Brighter Three Years Ago : The post-riot aid has dried up and Proposition 187 is law. We’re cooking up the ingredients for more trouble.

There will be no parades, keynote speakers or even a moment of silence this week to commemorate the third anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, a chapter of our city’s history that no one wants to reopen. But the truth is that despite the millions of aid dollars that poured into Los Angeles after the riots, for some of us, the future looked a lot brighter three years ago than today.

I remember that I was sitting in a class at Cal State Northridge when someone yelled, “The verdict was ‘not guilty’ and there is looting and buildings burning downtown.”Class was canceled and we were glued to our TV sets. The rest we all know.

By the time the green river of dollars started running into Los Angeles from Washington and Sacramento, people like me, living in East Los Angeles, were surrounded by employment opportunities and loan offers. Those old inner-city gyms that were thought to be useless were being renovated, painted and again opened for business. It felt as if all of a sudden we existed, and we had real problems that required real solutions. Every police officer wanted to be your friend and every local politician wanted to cut the ribbon to inaugurate the next local business. People wanted to help the newly discovered inner-city kids, regardless of color or immigration status.

Yes, those were the good old days. Isn’t it amazing what a burning city can do? Think about it, what protests, elections, city councils and elected representatives could not do, smoke did in three days.

No one would have imagined that only two years later, we would have something called Proposition 187--or the “Leticia A” court case that will force undocumented students to pay almost four times the regular admission fees at colleges. Nobody would have guessed that three years later, we were going to have the Three Strikes law or a “California civil rights initiative” that has nothing to do with civil rights.

Today it seems that to be poor is to be a criminal and that to apply for public assistance programs makes politicians mad enough to write bills and propositions to deny those services. When public schools graduate students with a sixth-grade reading level, poor parents are blamed because they spend just 20 minutes a day talking to their children. But that’s because they have to make ends meet with minimum-wage jobs that make them get up at 6 a.m. and bring them back home after dark. Mother does not have time to hear about what Jimmy did in school--if he got up on time to go to school in the first place, because there was no one watching him.

The riot happened only three years ago but the money has long stopped flowing We are stuck with harsh new realities. An unarmed teen-ager painting graffiti can be shot and killed and the “justice” system says that it’s all right. A Compton police officer can beat an unarmed man to the ground, kick him in front of dozens of people, have it on videotape and still no one finds grounds for a criminal prosecution. We keep piling up reasons to be angry.

The Los Angeles riots did not happen over one event. It was a chain of interrelated events. It was like a recipe that was cooked, ingredient by ingredient, until it boiled over. Today, we are cooking again.

Everybody criticizes Judge Lance Ito for the way he is handling the O.J. Simpson trial, but we should at least thank him for the distractions of the courtroom, for the way he is trying to prevent the next Los Angeles riot.