Yesterday, July 10, 2016, Rudy Giuliani fell into the media trap set by the implied emphasis in the slogan, “Black Lives Matter.”
He said in a televised statement, “Saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ is inherently racist.”
Mr. Mayor – saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not racist. It is mandatory.
What I believe you meant to say was that the BLM stance demanding the view “(Only) Black Lives Matter” is inherently racist; and you would have been correct.
Less than one lifetime ago, civilization fought a world war losing multiple tens of millions of lives to stop a militant political movement believing only kind of lives mattered. The Nazis believed only Aryan blond haired, blue eyed people of northern European extraction in perfect health and typically-developed lives mattered: Jews, Blacks, Gypsies, Mentally Retarded, Neuologically Atypical, Disabled, LGTBQ – all others were logs for the ovens next to the gas chambers where lives that did not matter were extinguished en masse – just as the white and police lives in Dallas were extinguished en masse a few days ago.
And – accusing people who say any other lives matter of anti-black racism is not so much racist as it is market-manipulative sloganeering and profiteering.
Coming up with a snappy slogan is easy: policy is hard.
Once people see the BLM sloganeers have no actual solutions – their “fifteen minutes” will be up.
Just as the LGTBQ community has widely succeeded in stigmatizing everyone who morally disagrees with homosexuality on ethical grounds as insane “phobes” or medieval “bigots” – the BLM leaders, who now get and keep their fifteen minutes of fame only if their motto gets and keeps traction, are manipulating the marketplace with the direct lie that to say the only humane sentence possible – “All Lives Matter” is racism equal to shouting the “N-Bomb” – is mere manipulation to keep the spotlight on themselves, and the cash and attention rolling into their organization.
Unbelievable how even people like Rudy Giuliani are losing their way right now.
I was a teenager in 1968.
It feels like that year is reemerging.
We must not lose another Martin and Bobby again to slogan-energized maniacs. We must not lose another Malcom and Jack again. We must not see more Medgars lost. We must not see another set of idealistic young Jewish civil rights workers murdered for giving their efforts to enfranchise communities of color. It must not become the Sixties again in the early Two-Thousands.
Black lives matter. White lives matter. Blue lives matter. Jewish lives matter. Gay lives matter. Yazidi lives matter. Boko Haram victim lives matter. ISIS-beheaded and burnt-alive lives matter.
All lives matter. Say otherwise – and you are de-facto, a racist.
We must not be market-managed into saying any one racial group is the only group that matters or truly suffers meaningful, relevant wrong, or deserves attention or remedy– which is what it means to “matter.”
Who in BLM wants to go to the wife and children of the Dallas policemen shot to death by a madman inflamed by rhetoric de-humanizing white policemen, and tell that wife and kids their husband’s death “does not matter?” I’d love to be there when they try. And – for the record – those white policemen who were there to protect the right of the blacks who were protesting to do so unharmed and unharassed – were the only people to run toward the source of the gunshots. Let me say it again: they ran toward the gunshots – to protect the black and other lives that mattered enough to them to risk and suffer death to insure their rights.
Who in BLM wants to go to the parents of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a young teenage girl whose throat was slit in her sleep in her own bedroom in Israel just for being a Jew in a Jewish land – and tell her parents Jewish lives do not matter?
Who in BLM wants to tell the Veterans of every race who cannot get adequate post-duty medical care that their lives do not matter?
All lives do matter. We will not be manipulated by schoolyard snap-fight tactics out of saying the only sane, humane sentence available: “All lives matter.”
All means all. Black lives are included in the word “all.”
Let us be clear-thinking: any African American honest and honorable efforts toward their cause’s importance not being minimized or made backwater are certainly valid; but saying or implying “only” their lives matter is merely and only wrong. Moreover, threatening violence if any other lives or causes are stated to be legitimate other than theirs is frankly, evil. I know that is what America’s Mayor wanted to say – but he fell into the trap. He said the wrong thing on camera. Now the profiteers and exploiters will step in and make even more hay of it for the coming season.
Who is ready for their lives not to matter?
If BLM’s implied (“only”) keeps getting traction from people who equate concern for any other race than black with racism, and like the “New Black Panther Party” threaten “No Justice, No Peace” violence and rioting – then we must steel ourselves to wake to another announcement like the one that came from the Ambassador Hotel in the summer of 1968 – that we have lost yet another Bobby Kennedy. Or like the news we got from Memphis – that a walking miracle like Martin Luther King, Jr. has been taken from us. America cannot afford to lose MLKs and RFKs to sloganeering profiteers with no solutions – which gains them attention and cash, but does not proffer any useful fixes for the problems. One of the Black Lives Matter co-founders, Ms. Johnson, walked up to Bernie Sanders at a Sanders rally, pushed him away from the microphone his campaign paid for – and said, “You gonna let me speak, sucka – or you are against Black people.” So –on camera – she stole a microphone she did not pay for, stole a podium belonging to someone else, and demanded things that were not hers, and the Sanders Campaign was stuck with a nightmare p.r. decision. Tell a thief on camera she needed to go buy her own microphone, pay for her own event, and exercise her right to free speech without stealing things paid for by others: or be called a “racist” by a BLM leader on-camera. Bernie Sanders, with a bewildered look on his face and no words to reply, simply stepped aside and gave the thief what she demanded by use of law-breaking and threats of various kinds of harm if he did not do her will. It was an on-camera mugging.
This conduct, Ms. Johnson said in an interview on Fox News, is her ‘solution.’ She said, “You all gotta give up some of what you’ve got to us.” That simple slogan-like, unidimensional thought is an old, stale, unoriginal and totally invalidated solution called “redistribution of wealth”––– and it is usually accompanied by crowds of the less-affluent carrying the impaled bodies of the more affluent over their heads on pitchforks while they chant whatever slogan someone has conjured to legitimize mass theft. Hieruslama Esta Perdita! (Jerusalem is lost!) was the cry that legitimized the anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe, killing Jews and taking some or all of what they had: the Jews (people who didn’t matter) supposedly had possession of Jerusalem (actually, at the time, Turkish Muslims had control of most of it). The Jews who didn’t matter needed to be thrust aside by the Christians who did matter: or, in our current season, by the post-Arabians who matter more than Jews do. Currently, ISIS is killing everyone who does not believe exactly what they believe: because to them, only their stripe of Islam matters – and chillingly, even a Muslim head of State has declared, “We are not loyal to ‘Iran’ – we are loyal to Islam. If ‘Iran’ must burn to the ground so that Islam may prevail, Alla’hu Akhbar! (God is great!).” We live in an era of increasingly acceptable casualties: up to the nuclear devastation of an entire country. The Iranian Head of State offered his entire country as a casualty for the sake of his ideology: the reply was to the specific question of how Iran plans to attack Israel once it acquires nuclear weapons, when Iran knows Israel has the ability to launch a counter-strike that would turn Iran into an Iran-shaped smoldering pool of radioactive ash and glass. Iran’s view is, “Iranian lives don’t matter.” Certainly, the parents of suicide bombers are telling their own children, “Your life doesn’t matter.” No message any life doesn’t matter is legitimate. It is an heroic irony that the white and police lives which did not matter to the extent they were extinguished by the Dallas sniper were lost as they gave their lives willingly to protect the rights and the lives of the mostly-Black crowd – which Black lives, to the targeted, dehumanized white victims, most certainly did matter.
So – while ex-Mayor Giuliani may have marginalized himself to a yet-undetermined degree with his unwisely framed comment – I hope America can move past the blood-in-the-water response to something more constructive.
We need to keep our collective national eyes on the ball.
To slightly paraphrase how Aaron Sorkin closed his movie modeling an intellectual meritocracy in the White House when it was assaulted by sloganeering profiteers: “We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them. And to those who only want to tell you who to blame for it and who to hate for it – your fifteen minutes are up.”
MLK’s words resound, even from the grave: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
MLK’s mentor, Mohandas Gandhi put the same thought into the language of personal commitment: “I can think of many causes for which I would be willing to die; but I cannot think of a single cause for which I would be willing to kill.”
So, sloganeers – please exit the stage.
Policy-wonks – if there was ever a time for you all to figure out how to capture the attention and support of the public, now is such a time.