'Black Lives Matter' Doesn't Matter?

Yes....someday I will just quit talking to people.  My teeth will be much the better for it.  Beer, while pleasant, may not be a good long term solution.  Maybe ranting is better....

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It's repulsive to have to repeat it, but..."any group of people has their assholes."  This is a back-assed way of implying an unfortunately well-abused logical fallacy.  A general class cannot be characterized by an instance of that class...no matter how loud and obnoxious and inflammatory that instance might be.

Which could be said about the Nazis, right?  But that's where the thinking, reading, man can earn his money.  Look at the historical context, the aims, the acts, the means a movement employs to further its professed goals.  Read behind the lines; do the results and the side effects have any relationship to the program?  Look at the long term good and bad!

All of which obscures the smaller, or larger, issue.  Exactly what benefits are our oppressed brothers supposed to be enjoying; or, more realistically, what were they promised, if we agree that they are a member of the class of 'all men'?  What are they being left out of?  What are they missing?

The 'assholes' might retort, caustically:  "Nothing.  Nothing we want from you, anyway."  But surely, if the American Experiment means or once meant anything, it was that our radical version of democracy was supposed to promote (not ensure, certainly not guarantee) a more just, a more civil, a more benign Big Brother.

And the Founding Fathers intended that this idealistic jihad would put a large burden on the citizen..every rational man/woman/hyphen-American has as "obligation to tolerance", a duty to think first and judge later.

To wait for the facts to come in.  For the results to be final.  To be the last person to jump to conclusions.  To detect and ignore the influence of the assholes.  To cut through the facade of rhetoric and respired gibberish to the meat of the honest concern.  To respect the force and inertia of a people's historical experience.

Which is hard.  We are going to bleed.  We are going to hear the sticks and the stones.  We are going to swallow our bile, our frustrated anger at the existence of idiots and loudmouths, whose existence and verbal flatulence obscures the real message and the real issues.

Perhaps the Fathers expected too much of us, or of humanity; should it have taken 150+ years to decide that our not-quite-white cousins are human beings, and acknowledge that 'all men' includes them?  Should we be surprised that they are slightly pissed, and vastly distrustful of us, considering the record of our individual and institutional past behavior, the machinery of which a few of our assholes persist in trying to popularize and revive?

It is NEVER time to stop bitching.  Our distrust in government and the status quo is not an aberration of recent ignorance or stupidity or perversity, but an ingrained attitude of the original charter of our country.  The Constitution, in fact, promised us very little, only that it considered the individual liberties of its citizens its first and greatest concern, if far from its only one.  While this sounds like a license to chaos, They didn't expect us not to exercise our common sense or ignore the facts of nature or hypocritically ignore the intent while pursuing the fruits of liberty.

So whither civil disobedience?  I am not going to trot out statistics and references at this point, but it can be easily demonstrated that peaceful civil disobedience is one of the best ways of effecting social progress; we owe many of the protections and comforts of our present existence to such 'outside the box' efforts.

Nothing ruins the prestige of an action more quickly than avowed chaos and thoughtless and inflammatory public utterance; and nothing lends one more credit than blind and reactionary police oppression, knee-jerk brown-people-bombing, and 'I told about those people' bigotry.

IN our current situation, where our plurality can or has already been purchased by reactionary forces, the usual chain of command is almost useless.  Civil disobedience may be the only way of undoing the erosion of the American social contract, whatever that may be at this late date.

When AIM made the plight of Native Americans impossible to ignore, when Dr. King captivated the world with his eloquence on behalf of its less-well-heard fraction, and now, when Black Lives Matter illuminates the pervasive and continuing existence of institutional bigotry and the tolerance of same...we should use every mental resource, every strand of emotional resilience, every impulse toward common decency, that our Founding Fathers expected us to possess and cultivate.  We were tasked to separate the wheat from the chaff; to do our very best, as citizens, to finally build the kind of society we fought to conceive for ourselves.  To break the cycle of adherence to the oppressive oligarchic systems of Europe that we so despised, way back when.

And yet, here we are...well on our way to creating our own Empire.  Do we want it?