CaCO3Girl posted:Swampboy posted:In case anyone wonders where the real Swampboy went, I temporarily set aside my normal hardline attitude toward politics when this veered in that direction because people are being polite.
And we will remain polite ;- )
My issue is the quote...he named his issue as THE COUNTRY. Is there a race issue, yup, has been and always will be in every culture across the world. When I was in 8th grade I had to do a paper on Apartheid, for those who don't know what that was, look it up, if you think the US race relations are bad I say, it isn't perfect but it could be worse.
I am a woman in a scientific field. I've had professors and colleagues that discounted what I had to say based on my gender alone. However, I blame THEM for their ignorance, not THE COUNTRY. Until THE COUNTRY passes laws to specifically oppress a segment of the population I do wish people would leave THE COUNTRY out of it.
Which brings up another issue altogether. Why do we always treat COUNTRY as if it's a football team. We cheer it on and proclaim our country to be "the greatest in the world," "the strongest," etc. This seems to be a fairly new concept in human history.
I used to joke in law school that I wanted to open a firm that only specialized in Jehovah's Witness First Amendment issues. Almost every important First Amendment case was a JH initiated case.
The current problem is more than a racial one - it's a police issue. It just happens that the burden falls more on African-Americans than any other group. The problem, from my standpoint is the hardline taken by many. The problem isn't even the small handful of "bad" officers - the problem is actually the "good" ones. Every time a Black youth is shot and killed, the African-American community sees it as an outrage. Why? Because, so often, it is outrageous. Then what happens? The police unions and the "good" officers circle the wagons. They don't differentiate between justified shootings and basic homicide. They back their own, regardless of the circumstances. This makes it difficult for those in the communities affected to have an objective view. I can't help but think things would be different if after one of the more obvious unjustified shootings occurred, the police departments and unions would stand up and say, "This is murder. We do not condone this and something must and will be done." That attitude would go a long ways toward credibility when backing up an officer of an actual justified shooting.
How can you expect a group of people who have been systematically singled out and mistreated by the system for 400 years to forget all that and trust the system in one or two generations? It takes longer than that and it takes a longer history of transparent justice and equality to achieve that - it can't just be lip service.
For those of you who jump on the Black Lives Matter movement with "shouldn't it be 'All Lives Matter," remember this - White lives have always been assumed to matter. It might be better to think of it as "Black Lives Matter, too." That's more the point that needs to be made.