Introduction

Hard core activists want attention, applause from sympathizers, the ability to claim the moral high ground through a bullhorn, and a place in society that grants them a type of street gang respect. And all this without the inconvenience and anonymity of having to support themselves with, well, a real job. The last thing they want to do is actually solve the problems they are pretending to address.

That is the subject of today’s 10-minute blog/podcast.

Continuing

We live in a unique and exceptional country; part of the equally unique and exceptional role that we play in the US is to understand who is actually trying to solve problems, as opposed to the people who prop up the problems to their advantage. 

Almost everywhere you look, things are getting better and better in our country, America. And the activists are getting louder, angrier and more physical. They are feeding the fires of racism, sexism, and you-name-it phobia in order to advance their own interests. The last thing they can stand is to solve the problem, and for the protested issue, their reason for living, to go away. That explains why as problems become smaller and more contained, activists are more vigorously beating the drums, shouting and pushing in the streets, and working a pliant media to make the problem appear larger and more menacing than ever. 

Pause for definitions. I am not talking about people who volunteer, who run, contribute to and work for non-profits. And the many others who quietly go about the business of actually making things better. They are my heroes.

Charges of racism are much in the news, more to hurl lethal accusations than to expose a real problem and fix it. “Checkmate” is the last thing that a winner might say in a chess game, indicating that his opponent has lost. The term “Racist” is now being used in the same way. Calling someone  a racist and having it stick is the political equivalent of Checkmate. Your opponent is now out of the game. 

Specifically, let’s talk about race activists e.g., Black Lives Matter (BLM). Their anger at the murders of innocent young black men until recently focused exclusively on their claims about racism causing deaths of black men at the hands of white cops. When they found that in some cases it was black officers shooting black citizens, their color criticism changed from “white” to “blue.” In other words, they pivoted from racist cops being the issue to police in general being the problem. But their activism continues to  ignore the 95+% of black deaths that are not caused by police. We’ll ignore for now the argument that the vast majority of that 5% are completely justified. We don’t need to make that case to make our point here.

I am deeply suspicious of BLM’s motives, and you should be, too. If they want to stop the murdering of blacks, why ignore 95% of where the murders are committed? Let’s look at an obvious parallel. Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) strikes predominantly African-Americans, with about 8% of the African-American population carrying the sickle cell trait. If an organization raised, say, $100M, to find a cure and spent 95% of its funds looking for causes for SCD outside of the African-American population, would you say they were dedicated to finding a cure? Or might they have another agenda? What might BLM’s real agenda be given that they ignore where 95% of the murders of black men occur? They simply want an excuse to attack and marginalize our law enforcement agencies, and will continue to do exactly that as long as anybody will pay attention to them. 

All lives matter, and that statement does not in any way imply that some lives are worth more than others. It takes a twisted view of the world to claim that all lives matter means that black, brown or Asian lives somehow matter less. 

Pause for a question.