Archive: Opinions

I read about artists who have been jumped on for proclaiming 'All lives matter' in recent days, and despite the fact that I will probably be blasted for saying so, I am completely baffled by that.  I understand that 'Black Lives Matter' is a slogan that is in specific response to a raft of police shootings of black people.  But I don't understand how saying 'All Lives Matter' undermines that.  In fact, it makes a stronger statement against the black shootings.

Here's why: 'Black Lives Matter' separates a segment of our population in our minds.  'All lives matter' says that we are all of equal value and should be treated accordingly.  It doesn't imply that some lives are more valuable than others, and there is no room for confusion on that point.  It says that shooting another person is precisely as horrible as shooting ourselves.  However, I am not saying that 'Black Lives Matter' doesn't make the intended statement -- I am just confused as to how 'All lives matter' belittles that.

As long as I am venturing so close to the politically incorrect line, I am confused by people who don't like President Obama on the basis that he is black.  Since he has one black parent and one white one, you could also argue that he is white.  Thinking people might see this as a unique opportunity for racial conciliation in America, but instead the public and the media have made it about polarization between races.  Obama himself, to his very great credit, simply refused to make race an issue in his two presidential campaigns.  Unfortunately that seems to have been too subtle for a lot of people to understand.  Yet that is exactly how we should all be viewing race -- as a cultural non-issue.

Racial discrimination, to some extent, is a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Oppressors and oppressed accept it in different ways, and respond in ways that creates further rifts.  The oppressed create cultural differences -- in cultural values, language, clothing styles, even accents.  That provides fodder for fear and dislike.  It makes it harder to communicate with eachother, because our same words don't necessarily mean the same thing to all of us.  Cultural differences are created out of what ought to be nothing.  Look at the origin of Yankee Doodle.

The British called Americans Yankee Doodle to belittle us.  'Doodle' meant 'simpleton'.  Americans made it a matter of pride by embracing the insult and soon it was great to be a doodle.  To this day Americans love that song.  The good news is that it gave our culture a way to celebrate itself and elevate its vision of its self-worth.  The bad news is that it accepted the British assertion that we were different and therefore deserved different treatment.  This kind of thinking leads to riots and wars that are certainly unnecessary.

Smithsonian Magazine published a 'fun facts about Star Trek' article in its may issue, and one of the facts was that the producers could get social commentary and dramatic action (such as the first inter-racial kiss) past the censors because their stories took place in a fantasy future in outer space.

"I had been a freelance writer for about a dozen years and was chafing at the commercial censorship on television. You really couldn’t talk about anything you cared to talk about," the program's creator Gene Roddenberry is quoted as saying.  "It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did."

Somehow these topics were acceptable for the sheltered television audience if the characters were going where no man had gone before, rather than on the mean streets of (insert major city here).  That makes one pause to think why are these venues different?  Why can't humans accept each other in fictional reality if they can do so in fictional space?  Why not in actual reality?

There has been an awful lot of killing in the news.  Everyone seems to agree it has to stop.  The way to stop it is to make it culturally unacceptable to view people as different enough to warrant killing.  I am not talking about slapping political correctness onto the problem.  I am talking about a true cultural shift in how we view each other.

The argument should be that all people are different, and that makes us all the same.  Everyone is of equal value.  If that were the cultural perception there would be no room for discrimination, and that would likely save lives, as well as make society a more pleasant place to live in.  All lives do matter.  That doesn't make some lives matter less.

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