A Word About BLM, Taking A Knee & Looting

 These are certainly trying times.  Between the pandemic and racial unrest it's a wonder the country hasn't crawled into a hole somewhere and waited for the dust to settle!  On that note I thought I would take a few minutes to share my feelings on this.

First a word about Black Lives Matter.  We all knew there would be the typical reaction-sometimes angry-where people yell back ALL lives matter.  Well, yes, of course they do. But those people miss the point.   All along, everyone has known white lives matter.  How many instances of police killing unarmed white men have there been?  We don't know but what we do know is that there have been far too many black men killed by police.  No one is saying all of these victims should be nominated for sainthood.  Of course not.  Many of them have a criminal past.  The point is once they are under control and it has been determined they are no longer a threat to themselves or others, why are choke holds necessary?  Well, they're not.  So the point of BLM is there have been far too many of these kinds of incidents and the motivation for them is racism-pure and simple.  So let's not all get our knickers in a knot and just remember the sentiment behind the slogan.

Second, about the looting and violence that has been a part of the demonstrations.  They're wrong and must not be tolerated.  But fact number one: it is a natural consequence of the amount of unrest within a given population-usually at the hands of a particular injustice. Fact number two: in spite of what we're being told, the ratio of looters to the peaceful protestors is very small.  Absolutely they need to be stopped but let's not lose sight of the main issue and let's not label everyone a looter.

The Knee-Remember when San Francisco 49ers football player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem?  What an uproar-from the president on down.  How dare he disrespect the flag!  The problem with this is I think it has been misinterpreted.  Where Kaepernick screwed up is doing it during the anthem but then again when else could he do it while drawing attention to what we are seeing now.  I don't think Kaepernick meant to disrespect the flag.  I think he simply meant to draw attention to a very serious problem that has lingered in this country since its founding.  We're paying attention now, aren't we?

OK, there's my two cents.  I know many, many people disagree.  That's fine.  It shouldn't mean we hate each other and it certainly shouldn't be a cause for further violence. 

Let's all take a collective breath and solve the problem.