Black Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, All Lives Matter

Do any lives matter?

It is the 4th of July.  There are many, can I suggest, anti-patriotic posts this year.  There are a lot of posts on misguided patriotism, on how America has failed to live up to its promise. This article that I’m posting today, in common with my norm, suggests that our American government fails as much because it has always favored the lives of the few as being the only important lives in existence and that the lives of the many do not matter.  I think American democracy, or any principle of democracy, is a step above autocratic government that out-and-out denies the existence of fairness.  But like the slave who knows he has no freedom, the democratic community casts a pale of deluded superiority to the wage earner over the slave, democracy likewise casts a delusion upon all who are not equally allowed self-actualization.  A democracy cannot exist if it grants more importance to some than others.  The delusion only exists by the continual need to choose teams of combat against each other , the farmer against the laborer, the protestant against the catholic, the white against the black—all of which allows masters to rule in the name of democracy by enlisting their team to fight battles against the opposing team to defend what is called democracy against the other team.  In this sense, then, I am patriotic to the idea, but have never found myself drawn to being patriotic to the practice that appears to me to be essentially contrary to the idea.

Of course if you examine the plot of the historical narrative, irregardless if in any particular chapter seems to present a happily ever after, in the next episode the story continues the pathos of the past chapter.  And in every chapter, whether it is the British mowing down non-violent protesters at the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, or Bull Connor in Birmingham.  Whether it is the treatment of the natives to enrich Leopold of Belgium, or Khan’s march eastward to regain his own lost freedom, or black Americans who fought in WWI to gain more freedom in America only to face massacres of their own when returning in Tulsa, Washington D.C, Norfolk and across many other cities.  It is not really very funny to compare “black crime waves” being statistically mostly directed against blacks just standing still until attacked by others.  Certainly Medgar Evars called for his freedom, but the only violence he participated in was being murdered on his front lawn.  

American democracy has done nothing to make lives of the exploited matter.  It is not only white against the black.Look at how white property was seized by Alonzo Cornell in New York to give to the railroad that then was never built.  And look at how the residents fought and were massacred just to defend their homes.  Look at the coal wars in Colorado that went on for four decades and see how many lives did not matter to the Coal kings.  Or had not mattered before they attempted a rebellion as the workers were forced into mines and only lived long enough to have children to replace them (on average a 30 year lifespan).  

Mining itself probably started with the discovery of iron and the superior weaponry it could wield.  Yes iron made stronger tools, but once again, the need for it would not have been that advantageous if weapons made from it couldn’t take more lives in battle. Children from 5 to ten, ripped from their homes and marched to mine for iron only to be replaced by more children who would not even live to have children of their own.  But the mothers and fathers in the villages were subdued with promises of wealth their children’s labor would bring them, a wealth that never came because none of the children’s lives mattered, use them until they died and steal more. How about the women who were working in a windowless building in 1911  and burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.  Well it mattered long enough to get windows put into buildings and safety measures to protect workers, right?  Well who of the younger class were most likely to die in the Covid epidemic?  Those who had to continue to work in slaughterhouses so their owners could have their steak dinner.  And really does anyone know of a rich owner or national leader who caught covid and  died?  Maybe some, I haven’t heard of any, so even before the vaccine, whether you believe in vaccines or not, if you had enough wealth or enough money there were remedies to keep you alive.  But not too much remedy for the poor crowded together in nursing homes whose lives do not matter, do they?

What do you mean Black Lives Matter, no All Lives Matter?; what do you mean when you say better access to health care and expanding medicaid to more?; what do you mean?  You certainly don’t mean the poor deserve to have the same health care as the rich—if you mean that, you are deceiving those you say it to.  Medicaid is subsistence medicine.  If you go to many an area in this country to a doctor who treats medicaid patients, tells them he can only treat one symptom per visit, but what if two symptoms are related?  It may matter to the doctor, he may be interested in his patient’s care, but just as the legal aide lawyer has too many clients and too few resources, so the medicaid doctor does as well. and he has to plea your symptoms down to serve others. Fifteen minutes and the doctor is gone.  Sometimes that 15 minutes includes the nurse taking the patient’s vitals.

What do you mean that any lives matter?  Show me the day in history when lives mattered.  Show me the day.  The whole unfunny satire is that Emmitt’s Till’s killers lives didn’t matter one whit more to the people who sent them, or trained them to be the lap dogs to take Emmitt’s life.  

Show me the day in history, in civilized history, where lives matter.  Find me a day in history when  bossman didn’t think lives were interchangeable as long as it was not his.  Show me one day in recorded history where the master risked his life to save the servant he himself had endangered.  Show me the day Scrooge thought Bob Cratchit’s life mattered?  So of course Scrooge’s change of heart did not extend past Christmas day.  In my nearly eighty years of life I haven’t witnessed a day when someone wasn’t willingly sacrificed to grant prosperity to a still-existing (uncrowned) king.  I haven’t turned the pages of any history book and found the heartwarming story of All Lives Matter and no lives being exploited to their death on such a wonderful day.  

The human life only matters to the community that is that individual’s community.  It does not matter to the exploiter of human life who limits the resources needed for human life to thrive.

Did anyone really expect George Floyd’s life to matter?  So said the bossman, “let’s send in the military and show them how little their lives matter.”  Well it’s happened. But not this time .  But it didn’t matter enough for Kyle Rittenhouse to become a hero by insuring we knew lives of those proclaiming Black Lives Mattered didn’t really matter, and just as with the killers of Medgar Evers, the taker of lives was exonerated for carrying out the bossman’s will.  Just as the lives of Russian soldiers don’t matter to the Russian bossman sending them  to kill the matterless lives of Ukranians, unaware, or maybe aware, that their own lives are as matterless to their own bossman as are the Ukrainians they are being sent to kill. 

Don’t kid yourself.  The owner of the resources who thinks the resources are his to exploit thinks lives are his to exploit as well.  The man who will control and desecrate the resources of the world has little concern for those he uses to do his exploiting.  And merely changing the name of the exploiter does not end the exploitation.

All we have are these songs of freedom, but the sheriff doesn’t care about our lives.  Don’t ask why Greg Abbot doesn’t abolish the gun that kills children.  Don’t ask why the Tennessee legislator asks the students what weapon they wish to be killed with.  The answer is obvious. Lives do not matter.

Or show me the day in history when they did.

But to the exploited alone lives matter and there are days in history that do show us that when others are imperiled they will arise to assist there fellow imperilees.  And from that we can move forward and away from this angry missive.  Because the exploited do rally around George Floyd and his meaningless death matters.  The lives of those who were too poor to flee Ian mattered a lot to each other and they risked their own to save each other.  But those who escaped the storm’s onslaught were more concerned about getting their businesses and homes rebuilt, weren’t they?  

So we can seek the human quest for freedom and return him to a place of importance in the community and deny the importance of the bossman-king-owner to his authority and control of our lives and our resources.  We can do that.  We can make him not matter.  But we can do it not through rebellion.  Rebellions strengthen his hand.  We can do it not through revolting and changing the bossman.  The way we do it, well we must leave history and return to prehistory and to what people in a common crisis still illustrate.  Human nature is a communal nature.  And human nature responds poorly and becomes inhumane when he is controlled. Hobbes had it reversed I believe. Humans are not savages by birth that need to be controlled to become civil in order to live together.  They are civil by nature and become savage under control.