Call Me A Racist

In our world, in our time, there are no concerns, no problems that have no organized advocates or critics, complete with packaged opinions and talking points and etiologies and eschatologies one might compare to a cult.  Everyone is "raising awareness," placing blame and yet offering no solutions unless you consider "kill the cops" or a lynch mob (literal or metaphorical) to be a solution. Is it any wonder we don't solve problems and that we polarize and stigmatize and hyperbolize everything that happens or doesn't happen beyond the point of rational discussion?

Police shoot people every day and we rightly worry that some misunderstanding, some trigger-happy officer may have occasion to gun us down. We worry because our lives matter, those of our family and friends matter and if we're good people the lives of other people matter. It's really a cornerstone of civilization, and compassion and a concern for justice are likewise universally lauded virtues.

Yet once again yesterday I was scolded, denounced and verbally trashed for reacting to yet another BLM cartoon explaining carefully as to an idiot, that people who say that all lives matter are only covering up the bigotry they, as Caucasians possess. Do they speak for all black people, do they offer a plan of action to work for justice?  I'm wrong for asking.

So what of the cartoon in circulation explaining carefully that the man standing alone with his house on fire gets no help from the man whose house is not because that man says "all lives matter." iSo what if it's self-contradictory and slanderous? Just accept that his callous lack of concern represents those who say "all lives matter."

It contradicts itself. It makes no sense.    Compassion for life will by definition compel me to help you, not to ignore you. If one life matters it's because all life matters, one follows from the other.  To reject that is to claim that only black lives matter. To reject that "Black lives matter too"  is true is an assertion that only black lives matter. Is accepting that a requirement to call oneself a liberal?  If so, I'm certainly not.

If I refer you to the video I watched this morning of two policemen gunning down a young white man that they stopped for having burned rubber at an intersection.  Will you say his life doesn't matter? Will you call me nasty names, treat me as though I were stupid if I shed a tear for a lost life? Will you start chanting and blocking traffic? Will you write headlines about being murdered for spinning his tires?  Will you demand the officers be jailed without due process and without other facts being considered?  Think carefully, it's a test, and if you insist his case is different, you flunk.

They approached him with guns drawn before he exited his vehicle. They shot him over and over with a semi-automatic handgun and once with a pump-action shotgun at close range. He was unarmed. He was lying on the ground. He just wasn't "following orders." Will you go out in the street and chant and stop traffic and bring your home town to a stop because his life, his death mattered?  Will you dance around chanting "hands up - don't shoot?"

Life matters and if you don't think so, your life matters all the less for it.  Life is accidental in this endlessly hostile universe and it's precious and fragile and to me, sacred. I don't care about your politics or the philosophical boogaloo you need to do to make it seem otherwise.