If you are tempted to say, “all lives matter” when you hear the phrase “black lives matter”, click HERE.
If you want to read a thoughtful, powerful woman’s thoughts on what it means to be black in America while cops are killing black men they have pinned to the ground, click HERE.
If you haven’t seen the videos of Alton Sterling being executed while he was helpless, and the level-headed actions of Philando Castile’s girlfriend as she live-streamed the aftermath of his shooting on Facebook, watch them if you can stomach them. They’re easy to find. They’re disturbing but they’re also important. People need to get disturbed about it.
Last Friday I put out this tweet and it captured a lot of response: “Every one of those Dallas cops was armed and trained. Tell me again how putting guns on everyone would save lives? #DallasPoliceShooting”. Most people immediately understood what I meant. That simply “having a gun” is no guarantee that a shooter will be stopped. Handguns are awfully ineffective against a sniper on the move from above, wearing body armour and armed with an old, Soviet style SKS rifle. Someone on Facebook responded that the problem is that people have lost God. I couldn’t let that go. Some of the biggest proponents of faith are in the NRA, the group that wants everyone armed, like the Old West. The problems are much deeper and more complex than that.
For every racist white cop who truly believes the next black man he stops will shoot him, there’s a racist black man who thinks his life’s options are being suppressed by white people. To some minds, I am the problem, and so are you.
The question I have is, will people finally force some sort of change? Or will the senseless killings continue while Americans wring their hands and offer their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims? Thoughts and prayers, while well-meaning, aren’t very useful right now. People are going to have to get upset enough to do something, and thinking and praying simply aren’t nearly enough.
Sadly, neither you, I or any of your readers are likely to live long enough to witness real change. In cases like this society often looks to our leaders, that being all to often government to take action but when they are impotent and loathed to do so because of some naive ideology it manifest itself into anger and frustration resulting in what I’ll call the Trump effect which seeks to fix the problem by addressing a symptom. Anger can be a great motivator for change, but only if it is focused and directed at the underlying problem, not the mere symptom, so the cycle continues.