All Lives Matter

In the light of the devastating murders of the police in Dallas, I felt compelled to write this article. All of this divisiveness is tearing our country apart. While it is tragic that anyone gets shot, we must recognize that in a society, any society, there will be bad actors. Evil does not differentiate between race, creed, color, religion, or politics. There are people infected with hatred and evil and no matter how many laws we make or how hard we try, we cannot eliminate it.

What we can do is to try our best to educate people on how to identify it in those you deal with. If you detect it, you should do your best to avoid it. We hear from people about how they think that cops have a war on Blacks. Well that is just wrong. There certainly might be and probably are some police officers which either have a certain level of prejudice against some who are different from them. If at any time that there is a shooting, whether it be white on black, black on white, black on black, white on white, or any combination involving any one of any race, it should be investigated. Black White, Latino, Middle eastern, European, Asian or whatever, ALL LIVES MATTER.

When a black person gets shot by a white police officer we hear that it is race based and there is a call by people that there be justice served by convicting the police man. But when a policeman shoots a white person, there is no outrage. I remember thinking when I heard that in Ferguson, an unarmed black teenager was shot by a cop, I thought, an unarmed anybody shot by a cop is wrong. But then the facts of the situation came out. After we found out it was a thug who was almost twice as big as the cop who had already tried to get the officers gun when he was in the car and smashed his face and then was charging at the officer after that, we learned that the policeman had a legitimate fear and was reasonable in his actions. The problem is, no one wanted to wait for the facts to come out before they decided to lynch the cop in the media. Then the Administration continued the lie that was started by people based on race. Then they allowed a group of people to call themselves “Black Lives Matter” and call for violence against ALL police.

If a person is bad, let’s find out by finding the facts and punish them accordingly. I know that if the investigation proves that any policeman acted inappropriately and took another persons life, they should be dealt with in the same manner that we deal with anyone who does that. No matter who they are, they should not be above the law. Let us wait to find out the facts before we pass judgment. Just as when the police shoot someone without having all the facts, they may end up making a bad decision. But what we must keep in mind is that by the nature of their job, they often have very little time before they must react to a situation. People often want to make it about the gun. It is the person, not the weapon.

If you think that there is no crime or death in a society that does not allow their citizens to have guns, you are sadly mistaken. If you honestly look at the statistics, you would see, that in most countries there is a higher violent crime rate if you take out the numbers in our cities like LA, New York, Chicago. Those numbers are up there due to the large gang problems that aren’t dealt with properly. When you let a group like “Black Lives Matter” to go around putting out a stance that Black lives are the only lives that matter. If there were a group of people who demonstrated and called themselves “White Lives Matter” you would hear outrage. They would make claims of those people making statements that theirs is the only life that matters. and it was divisive and racist. Why is it acceptable to have a group say theirs is more important? Simply because they are Black? No, to allow that to be given any type of legitimacy is only serving to create a divide. Like the President said, we can do better, we must do better.