Is this America?

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when you reply that all lives matter to someone saying black lives matter, you are not helping. not sure if anyone will read this, but here is a great explanation i've had to use too many times:

Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment -- indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!

The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That's the situation of the "black lives matter" movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn't work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn't want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That's not made up out of whole cloth -- there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it's generally not considered "news", while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate -- young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don't treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don't pay as much attention to certain people's deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don't treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase "black lives matter" also has an implicit "too" at the end: it's saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying "all lives matter" is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It's a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means "only black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case. And so saying "all lives matter" as a direct response to "black lives matter" is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

TL;DR: The phrase "Black lives matter" carries an implicit "too" at the end; it's saying that black lives should also matter. Saying "all lives matter" is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.
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The Landfill of Slacktown said:
We were posting the same damn thing
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rick81721 said:
Yes it's a career where men and women put their life on the line to save ours. Pretty disgraceful comment, but no surprise...
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Yeah right behind loggers, fishermen, pilots, roofers, garbagemen, machine operators, taxi drivers, etc. There are plenty of dangerous jobs that put "their lives on the line".

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None of them get cool flags made up for them.
 
rick81721 said:
Shouldn't it be everyone's answer? Shouldn't all lives matter - black, white, blue, other? Seems simple to me.

And you didn't hear about the woman killed by capital police yesterday??

PS question for you - you don't post here for years and come back for this nonsense? Why??
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No sir. You know this. Everyone knows this. You are deflecting. The ONLY acceptable answer is YES.

Second, I heard about the person, yes. I have no knowledge of the specifics surrounding her death. I don't make it a habit if talking about things I don't know about. Did she comply?

Lastly, nothing about any of this is nonsense.
 
rick81721 said:
Yes it's a career where men and women put their life on the line to save ours. Pretty disgraceful comment, but no surprise...
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You want a fucking disgraceful comment? The lies that killed 350k Americans, the shit that is getting healthcare works killed every day. Not using your unique position to up the supply of PPE and stealing it from states who have to out bid eachother.

Police should be more worried about themselves as they're more likely to commit suicide than be killed in the line of duty.
 
The Landfill of Slacktown said:
Tell me how I can man up, should I rush the capital building with the flag of the United States of America?
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Go grab a can of gas and go down to your local Target or Walmart with a lit match, that's seems to be socially acceptable. Can you honestly say your life is what it is in this country because society put you where you are? Your successes and failures had nothing to do with you or your initiative?
 
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