I have purposely refrained from commenting on the recent police involved shootings. I have a long standing practice of not jumping to conclusions before we have all the facts. I will leave that to the main stream media and the Obama Administration. But, with the recent attack on the peaceful Black Lives Matter protest and murder of police officers in Dallas I feel compelled to speak out. Notice I said attack on the Black Lives Matter protest as that is exactly what it was. I also didn't say White police officers as they weren't all white. It wasn't just white people, or black people, or Asians or Hispanics, etc. that were attacked, it was all of us. This was an attack by an individual who was so overcome by hate for white people and police officers that he wanted to kill his fellow human beings and didn't care who might get in the way. Black lives didn't matter to him. No lives mattered to him.
The only thing that mattered was killing white people. This is why the idea that saying anything other than "Black Lives Matter" is racist is so very wrong. Yes, black lives matter, and I actually understand what the originators of the slogan were trying to say. The problem is what you were trying to say becomes irrelevant as soon as you try and pretend that saying "all Lives matter" is somehow racist. It completely defeats the meaning of the original slogan. I agree, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are different than us. I have been a police officer for a long time and I have never stopped someone for the so called offense of Driving While Black. Nor do I know of any police officer who has, but I'm not ready to say it doesn't happen and I would concede that somewhere it probably does. With that said people need to put themselves in the shoes of police officers as well. We have a dangerous job and even though line of duty deaths is going down, assaults on officers aren't. You can argue there is no so called war on cops all you want, but I strongly believe the recent events in Dallas pretty much proves you wrong. (Disregarding my personal opinion that using the word "war" to describe it is wrong. )
