PrintNobody's life matters to Black Lives Matter
Most Black Lives Matter demonstrators, especially most of the violent ones, seem to be woke white kids who have limited experience of just plain living. Experience teaches that most of the time — not always, but the big majority of the time — there are actually pretty good reasons things are as they are. You may not know those reasons, but even if you do and you haven't lived, say, 35 years or so, with a wife and kids and a mortgage and a job, you don't have enough leavening experience to recognize that in America, you are usually your own biggest problem. Understanding that and doing something about it — that is, fixing yourself — is so much harder than indignant self-righteousness and parading your virtue around.
Charles Love points out that "white people overwhelmingly [depict] black people as desperate and defeated, with no way to pull themselves out of their misery." Yet life experience puts the lie to the idea that whites have a white-privilege skin color advantage in America. Walt Williams notes that if you "totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations."
The media would have us believe that black people sympathize more with black criminals (because of skin color) than with the police (who suppress criminal behavior). It would follow that blacks prefer to live with criminality, so long as it's black, over having safe streets. This makes no sense to any reasonable person, but the media and BLM certainly give that impression. Since they remain silent about the thousands of inner-city black-on-black murders, they further give the impression that only black criminal lives matter. Since black police also kill black criminals, but we never hear about it, the media and BLM only really seem to care when white police kill black criminals.
The goal appears to be the abolition of white police on the way to abolishing all police. Besides white, native, and Hispanic, blue lives don't matter, either. But when you consider how nasty, brutish, and short life would be without police — the inner city as model for everywhere — BLM boils down to this: nobody's life matters.
