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| Offensive rant? Or incredibly obvious! |
Yet
it also has the ability to bring out the worst in people who usually don’t take
too much to get themselves all worked up into a lather.
THE
SLOGAN IS one that was adopted by the activist types who are upset with what
they perceive as excess force and violence used by police and other allegedly
law-and-order mentality types against black people.
On
the surface, it is an incredibly obvious statement – life does matter. One’s
significance to our society shouldn’t depend on one’s race (and I don’t want to
hear that we’re all a part of the “human” race, because if we’re honest, we don’t
behave like that).
But
the conservative ideologues, particularly those who are motivated by race,
detest such a thought. They complain that “Black Lives Matter” somehow is
disrespectful – perhaps they think that attention paid to black people is attention
diverted from themselves.
Which,
to me, sounds like it’s their own hang-up that is the problem, and not the
slogan.
ANYWAY,
“BLACK LIVES Matter” is gaining public attention for the number of outbursts.
Most recently, a Unitarian church in the Beverly neighborhood was forced to
remove the slogan from a sign outside their building.
The
DNAInfo.com web site reported that many people were using the Internet to
anonymously (of course) rant and rage about the church because of what they
wanted to consider as a subversive concept.
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| Scary that Archie Bunker image still fits |
Which
sounds as ridiculous now as those old “All in the Family” episodes of four
decades ago when actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character would refer
to provisions of the U.S. Constitution about personal freedom and liberty as “Commie
crapola.”
I
find it ridiculous that some people seriously have objections to thinking that
police brutality is a problem – or that anybody somehow deserves such
treatment.
THEN
AGAIN, THEY’RE probably the ones who don’t have a problem with Sarah Palin –
who on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., said that protesters who organize around “Black
Lives Matter” are really nothing but “dogs.”
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| Not the attention Beverly Unitarian usually seeks |
Or
as the Washington Post reported, they were dogs whom President Barack Obama won’t
call off.
Palin,
by comparison, says she wants to offer her support to police officers in
departments all across the nation. As though the woman whom John McCain
considered fit to be president “just in case” thinks it’s an all-or-none
proposition.
Any
respect paid to black people somehow detracts from law enforcement, and that
somehow racial concerns (or the fears of certain segments of our society)
warrant hostile treatment toward those whose racial origins trace back to the
African continent.
YES,
I THOUGHT that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly (just after offending the ideologues
by being less-than-reverential toward Donald Trump’s presidential fantasies)
made herself sound ridiculous when she implied that “Black Lives Matter”
protesters were somehow, in and of themselves, a “hate” group racially biased
against white people.
That
is the same mentality that put the Beverly Unitarian Church on notice that it
didn’t want the church offering support to the “Black Lives Matter” concept. Or
anything else it probably thinks of as “pinko” or “n----r-loving” or whatever
other narrow-minded term they use to express their ignorance.
I’m
not about to call for our society to express equality for all, or any other
high-minded talk. I’m enough of a realist to know that bigoted thought is
always going to prevail amongst some people.
But
it is when our government starts reinforcing the hang-ups (like that goofy
rural Kentucky county clerk wants to be able to do for those who can’t handle
the concept of gay marriage) of that segment of society, that is when we become
as morally bankrupt as the ideologues think we already are.
-30-
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