Over the past 50 years, our culture has successfully programmed most of its white citizens to be ashamed of being white, while programming most of its black citizens to believe the canard that, just because of the legacy of slavery, blacks are exempted from the need to feel shame. Perhaps the most impactful action of Black Lives Matter is their exploitation of this dual dynamic. Black Lives Matter has
never been an organization dedicated to improving the lives of blacks compared to whites. Its main focus is the destruction of our entire culture in the hopes that they will be part of the vanguard that will replace capitalism with communism or socialism. Unless they've recently scrubbed their web sites, it's all right there.
@pathway, I invite you to do some
serious research into this. If, on the one hand, you want to remain comfortable in the propaganda you've been fed by mainstream white and black media, then just continue limiting your attention to CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC and just about any black radio talk show; those entities have been coordinating with each other ever since at least the early 1990's to make sure they're all on the same page. The echo chamber quality of it has resulted in a generation of young blacks who are
convinced of such 'facts' as that (a) young black men are being hunted down by police, (b) unarmed black men are significantly more likely than unarmed white men to be killed by police officers, and (c) something called systemic racism exists that prevents blacks from any kind of success.
On the other hand, if you sincerely want to drill down to
real facts (because, while we're all entitled to our opinions, we are not all entitled to our own conveniently-held 'facts'), you will get super curious, and I would assert that, as a black man who I assume cares deeply about other blacks, you will discover that the propaganda you've come to believe (like the lie about unarmed black men being shot down by police every week) has been designed by its creators
since the beginning to
harm black human beings -- and that
that effort has been successful. Poor blacks will suffer the most egregious collateral damage if the anarchist/communist organizations like Black Lives Matter are successful in their promotion of defunding or eliminating the police.
But, along the way, you will encounter actual facts (especially if you do some of your research at the U.S. Census Bureau's National Crime Victimization Survey site) that will be
very inconvenient to many narratives that are simply taken for granted in recent black culture. You can start with this: it
is true that, per capita, unarmed black men are killed by police officers more often than unarmed white men. However, even that is only slightly true. What undercuts the whole "they're out to gun us down" narrative is another fact: per capita, on average, that is, black men in America are significantly more likely to commit almost all crimes. Per the FBI database (and these percentages are based on the fact that there are 5.68 times as many whites as blacks in America), black men are 7 times more likely to commit murder (despite being a much larger percentage of the population, white men are also more likely to be murdered by a black man than vice versa), 2.5 times more likely to commit rape, 5 or 6 times more likely to stab someone, 7 times more likely to commit armed robbery, 3 times more likely to commit aggravated assault, more likely to carjack, etc., etc. Blacks are even more prevalent among so-called white-collar crimes (over 3 times as likely to embezzler, for example). When those facts are taken into account, another fact emerges: committing violent crime has a correlative reaction: one becomes more likely to have encounters with the police when one commits crimes, and the more unfriendly contact one has with the police, the more likely one is to experience harm from the police.
Don't forget: unarmed also doesn't always mean non-combative. [From August 2019, when Black Lives Matter completed their planning for the rioting that began this spring, they had to wait until George Floyd was murdered to create the supposedly precipitating event -- and pallets of black bricks were dropped off in key 'protest' sites in at least 14 cities
well before George Floyd was killed.]
Also, the statistics have been run, analyzed, sifted and sorted, and another fact emerges: per encounter with police, black men are actually significantly
less likely to end up dead than are white men.
So what Black Lives Matter (an organization that cares much more about its aims than it does about black lives; they were just clever in their choice of a name) has done is take a pre-existing falsehood and broadcast that falsehood to the extent that, in combination with white guilt, a whole society is now willing to bow down to it. The
purpose? To foment race war and dismantle our society.
Will black lives be safer if everything falls apart? Or will they be less safe?
This is a baby that should be thrown out with its bathwater.
Our country has (I hope only) temporarily lost its collective mind during this no-coincidence double whammy of exaggerated fear of a seasonal flu and rioting inspired and carried out by fascist anarchistic communists. A lot has been written at this web site and elsewhere about how our world is currently a systematic layering of pawns and useful idiots. We all become pawns if we take what is happening at face value. We are furthermore useful idiots if we join causes on either side of either divide. I strongly assert that even most of the leadership members of the medical community promoting the COVID scare and most of the grassroots members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter are useful idiots. Many of those people are true believers in their causes, wholly unaware that they are being manipulated by the top leaders of those causes or that their causes are being manipulated by people at much greater levels of power who see advantages to their power of society being in an uproar. No matter who those upper-level people are, it is nearly impossible to discern what the beneficial results could be to the average citizen, so these days I'm encouraging everyone to resist the temptation to join in on the us-vs.-them mentality, no matter where one finds it.
Whites have things to be ashamed of. Blacks have things to be ashamed of. Whites have things to be proud of. Blacks have things to be proud of. All four statements are true, and they are primarily true because we are all human beings endowed by our Creator with equal standing in His eyes --
all made in His Image.
Lastly,
@pathway, I would assert that you as a 71-year-old black man and I as a 66-year-old white man have far more in common than whatever it is in the present that could possibly divide us by race. I say that because
both of us can remember the time period when I was going to middle and high school in a small Texas ranch town in the 1960's, a town where the owner of a small grocery store literally dragged me out by my ear because I had (unbeknownst to me) entered the store through the Negro entrance, a town where blacks weren't permitted to sit on the main floor of the town's movie theater and I was once, again, literally dragged out of the balcony by a summoned police officer because I wanted to sit with a friend in that balcony (which was never cleaned by staff). You and I both lived through a time when such things were not ubiquitous but they also weren't altogether uncommon. Until 1967, all blacks in our county (one of the most populous in Texas) were bused out of their school districts to attend one huge k-12 mega school. My mother took me monthly when she volunteered at the Mossier Valley Community Action Agency center, where I discovered that the county refused to pave the roads, and where I met a pair of brothers who had to take turns playing in our pick-up basketball games, because, among the 8 children in their family, they had only 2 pairs of shoes to share, one for the older girls, one for the older boys -- and it wasn't just a matter of poverty; until the CAA center had opened, there was simply a lack of human compassion for the residents of this hamlet, because of their race.
You and I have seen this and experienced it. Your experience, of course,
has to have been different from mine, but at least it is a shared experience that people far younger than we can only imagine -- no matter how much they convince themselves that that level of racism survives to this day. I say 'imagine' on purpose, because that is what is being exploited in this climate: nefarious people are exploiting human imaginations by filling them up with prevarications that permit young people to inappropriately feel like they can totally relate to their predecessors, even their distant ancestors. The flip side of that coin, though, is that, just as the millennial generation can only imagine what you and I witnessed (and thus perhaps feel compelled to manufacture grievances beyond what reason can substantiate), you and I can only
imagine what it was like to live through a time
in our country when people were literally enslaved. I'm sure you, like I, can remember
talking with people when you were young who survived the Civil War and could talk about their experience of being born into a family of slaves or a family of slave owners. But, for us to hear those stories was akin to a youngster today hearing us tell the stories of the 50's and the 60's. In fact, most of the folks I met who survived the Civil War and Emancipation freely acknowledged that even
they didn't really remember much about it, because they were mostly so young that their lives afterward ended up making much more of an impression on them.
When we either (a) get on a bandwagon about some trend out there we've heard about or (b) internalize grievances of the past that were actually experienced by long-dead real human beings, we do great harm to not only our communities but to our own spirits. The Adversary wants us to slink through life with victim mentalities; he wants us to hate our fellow human beings. That's not our Father's agenda, other than perhaps indirectly to the extent that the Adversary is doing His bidding for some greater Purpose. We are exhorted by Christ to love
everyone with whom we associate, not just those who meet our approval.
I'll end this sermon by making a suggestion: maybe it's time to entirely stop listening to the Grievance Industry. Those people can't possibly want what's best for their fellow citizens; they're just in it for either the cash or to promote their niche of a cause that will only benefit a select few. Maybe it's time to turn a deaf ear to those who would get us to focus on what's unfair or screwed up. Maybe it's time instead to redirect almost all of our energy toward citing and celebrating what's wonderful. Of course, it would be a mistake to direct all of one's energy toward the uplifting, because to do so would make one unprepared for the very real evil that exists in the world, but to devote even a significant minority of one's time to causes that require one to identify enemies and bring them down when no evidence exists that anyone's really going to benefit from it is a tragic waste of one's precious human resources.
Because slaying dragons is never a clear-cut one-sided battle.
