Black
lives matter.
Blue
lives matter.
All
lives matter.
Really?
Blue
lives are voluntary.
Black
lives aren’t.
In
light of the blue lives,
in
light of the Dallas disaster,
(and
future tragedies)
black
lives still matter more.
Why?
Without
access to recourse, redemption, and justice,
black
lives continue to endure
the
historic, systematic oppression
by a
few bigoted, lawless, blue lives,
injuring
all lives.
Although
it feels like the country is coming unhinged, facts do not support
the idea of an increasingly violent world. The statistical aggregate
illustrates how black and blue lives have never matter more to each
other than now. Fewer cops die violently on our streets than in past
decades. Brown people of all lineages are better off in contemporary
Western Culture. But it doesn’t feel this way and it shouldn’t.
Cellphone
cameras have changed our point of view. Never before have we been
able to witness the brutality perpetrated by ugly blue lives upon
innocent black lives. The scene is not new, only the witness has
changed. Imagine the images a Jim Crow era camera might’ve
captured. What would a Ken Burns, in-depth documentary on a day in
the life of a typical slave-catcher in the antebellum South look
like? We are at the crossroads of their history and our future.
Through
social-media and ready-access to recording devices, we are simply
peering under the carpet at the buried secrets, constituting that
infested, dusty, mess of fibrous complexity; what every Southern,
black family of the 1800’s knew firsthand, now everyone understands
to one degree or another. There is no doubt that the horror-show we
see today is but the tip of a very old iceberg. White America is
waking up to the digital images black America has endured for
centuries. We can thank technology these memories no longer die with
the victims.
One
chooses to become a cop, a blue life. One can always remove the
badge, hang up the gun, walk away, and no longer be a blue life. One
cannot choose to walk away from a black life. One cannot say they’ve
had enough and simply change their culture, their family, their skin,
their history. The Dallas shooting is a metric, a point of
measurement. After forty-eight hours where the President repeatedly
stepped away from international business to comment on yet another
unarmed black man killed by a cop, he again consoled the Nation as
five officers were gunned-down. Testifying to just how little
specific black lives matter to some blue lives, the repetitive images
of these past few months became so unbearable as to radicalize a home-grown terrorist. The only difference between the act of
this contemporary, semi-organize fanatic and the campaigns of the
KKK (during Jim Crow) was instead of supporting the terrorism, blue
lives became its target.
Justice
is long overdue. The barbarity visited upon black lives by blue lives
is a deep, festering, open wound only made worse by the incident in
Dallas. One would be hard-pressed to pick a worse target for
vigilante justice than the Dallas Police Department. Of all the
police forces across this country, few work longer or harder to mend
this wound than the DPD. Before it was “the right thing to do,”
deescalation programs had been instituted with great effect. Officer
involved shootings are down; they’re moving in the right direction,
an example to be followed, not ambushed. When blue lives hold
themselves to the highest standards of accountability, peace, and
justice, they become valuable to black lives, all lives. Dallas is a
dark irony, a cruel setback.
As
long as all black lives do not matter to even a handful of blue
lives, Dallas may not remain the most deadly end of blue lives in
America any more than Orlando will keep its top spot. Authorities
often say they have to be right one-hundred percent of the time while
criminals only have to be right once. To understand the solution,
let’s flip this. It only takes one bad cop to hurt ten-thousand
good ones. As long as any department remains indifferent to a culture
of silence, racism, and prejudice, bad cops will feel free to be
themselves.
Why
do so few lives smoke cigarettes in 2016 when so many smoked in 1966?
Culture. We can try to profile and weed-out the outliers, the
bad-apples, and play Wac-A-Mole. In that case, nothing really
changes; somewhere in the country another black life will be taken by
a blue life (increasingly caught on camera). The only way to fix this
is to change the blue culture. Embrace the camera. Embrace
deescalation. Embrace C.O.P. (Community Oriented Policing). Until
blue culture changes and proudly joins the chant, “black lives
matter!” the onerous remains with the blue lives, those with tacit
immunity, those with options, those with legal authority, those with
weapons, helicopters, robot-bombs, and tanks (do they really need
tanks?).
The
term ‘blue lives’ is misnomer. There’s no such thing. Blue is a
job, a career. No one is born blue, well maybe in a blue family but
that’s not the point. Just as with green lives, blue lives are the
creation of society, something we deem necessary for peace and
prosperity. Unless we discover a better alternative to law and order
as a political concept, We the People can find a better way to do
business. And again, thanks to science we are learning more and more
about how to change and improve culture. With the will of the People,
holding law-enforcement to “best practices” through continued
protest and legislation, we can change our blue lives so drastically
that it might become as likely for a smoker to book a non-smoking
cruise as a bigot to join the force; without it being about ending
the addition, it would simply be unbearable. And let us hope enough
lives demand this before the next bad cop leaves all those good cops
black and blue,
yet
again.
