It’s been two months since my last post. Two months of COVID life and living (or not). It blows my mind how much can happen in just a matter of weeks. Before COVID, the TV was all about politics and the opinions of talking heads. I refuse to call it news anymore since, IMO, honest and factual news went out with Walter Cronkite.
The pandemic erased politics, and anyone openly complaining about it seemed uncaring and uninformed. We were blasted 24/7 with number of deaths (not number of recoveries) nationally and worldwide. Even deaths from the complications of other major illnesses became COVID-related deaths. (There was more money to be made that way.) Ventilators became SOP. (There was more money to be made that way. ) Face masks became the norm. (OSHA would disagree.) Social distancing, hand sanitizer, masks and percentages, vaccines, testing, checkpoints…these all became the norm.
Enter George Floyd, (*Note, this Wiki article on Mr. Floyd has interestingly removed any previous mention of him holding a pistol to the belly of a pregnant woman he assaulted.) and COVID took a place in the background. Suddenly social media wasn’t so social anymore. Friends were unfriended and families divided. Justice, injustice, tolerance, misunderstanding, lines drawn in the sand. Terrible images of American history were being destroyed while Hollywood started apologizing. Panderers embarrassed themselves. Marches, protests, Antifa, systemic racism. Suddenly, apparently, black lives mattered more than COVID deaths.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying what happened to Mr. Floyd wasn’t wrong. It was very wrong. And while I agree black lives matter and I applaud the demonstrators in their peaceful movement, the difficulty for me is what’s getting lost or ignored in the movement. I cannot understand for the life of me how intelligent people of all races and ethnicity don’t see that this is being used for political gain by the very people they believe are on their side. Why are we still our color or our race? Why haven’t we learned from the horrible riots of the ’60s that ravaged the country from Los Angeles to Newark and Detroit to Miami? Did Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy die in vain? We had President Obama in office for eight years! Seriously, after all of that, if things haven’t changed, don’t you wonder why? Let’s ask ourselves, WHY HAVEN’T THINGS CHANGED? Who is perpetuating this division? And more importantly, why?
Using race as part of our identity keeps the division alive!
Morgan Freeman has it right: “I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.” Can’t it be just that simple as a place to start? “Black lives matter.” Think about it.
LiviKnit 