‘I understand black lives matter. But that’s not my movement, right now. My movement is to let them know that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.’ And his son is dead.
In a gripping, gut-wrenching, heartrending, half-hour interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr. tearfully plead with social justice warriors and anyone watching that his son’s black life mattered, too.
Horace Jr. was just 19 years old when he was shot and killed at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ongoing Protest (CHOP), the police-free, six-block city encampment created with the blessing of Democratic officials. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan cheerfully dubbed the anarchist takeover a ‘summer of love,’ apparently unaware that the first Summer of Love, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, ended in rampant criminality, drug addiction, sex abuse and the other varieties of misery which have marred the City by the Bay ever since.
I know, I’m an old white guy and therefore anything I would say on this subject certainly means my skin color means I’m ineligible to do so, plus it means I’m racist. Hey, give me a break. I’m WOKE! I understand what “Black Lives Matter” means and stands for according to conventional and current social demands. While I know what I have to say puts me squarely in the bullseye of the Cancel Culture police, if I get “canceled,” it will have nothing to do with the applicability or correctness of the content of what I say. Just because someone alleges something I say – something ANYBODY says – is wrong, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And before anyone jumps to “cancel” me, my life of 67 years speaks anything other than racism. So, I suggest you listen for a moment or two or just cancel out of what I have to say right now. Because if you’re going to stick to the WOKE rule that “no white person can possibly understand racism,” you will not receive anything I have to say anyway. That, of course, has nothing to do with the merits of what I say. It speaks rather to your unwillingness to consider something that may force you to rethink an absolute or two you’ve embraced. And maybe you’ve embraced something incorrectly or for the wrong reasons.
At least, give me a shot. There’s no harm in listening, is there?
The Black Lives Matter movement has apparently abandoned the substance of its purposeful founding and should quickly rethink the operational process that is today underway nationwide. If that doesn’t happen soon, what credibility the movement had will be flushed down the toilet as little more than hypocritical radicalism that has for generations seen so many initially worthy causes fade away because their actions decry their claims of purpose for existence. Why? Instead of stepping up and responding in the face of REAL horrors that many in the African American community face daily, BLM has allowed itself to morph into little more than another radical social cause that looks and acts nothing like its claimed purpose and nothing that its name alleges it is.
Few question that African Americans have suffered unfair treatment in the criminal justice system. There is far too much in-your-face evidence to discount it. And because of the generations of politicians simply looking-away, far too many Americans reject its pervasiveness. And that’s sad. Black Lives Matter (at least formerly) had the perfect opportunity to be the voice for black Americans who socially suffer at the hands of not just a few racist law officers, but at the hands of racism that many who are perpetrators don’t even know they’re the culprits! Last year, 9 African Americans were shot and killed by white cops – that in a nation of 330 million people. Say what you will, but that number doesn’t justify the $130 million “seed” given to BLM by George Soros. Think of what even a small chunk of that $130 million could change in the lives of a large number of African American children.
What might have been for Horace Jr. had he never crossed the perimeter of CHOP? What if he had managed to escape his revolutionary captors who blocked paramedics from coming to his rescue as he bled to death in their new urban utopia?
What might have been for eight-year-old Secoriea Turner had she survived Atlanta’s Fourth of July? During a press conference, her heartbroken father, his voice hoarse, pleaded, “They say, ‘black lives matter.’ You killed your own. You killed your own this time just because of a barrier. They killed my baby.”
Atlanta’s Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, flanked by Turner, grim-faced police officers, and families grieving the weekend orgy of violence, was to the point: “The reality is this: These aren’t police officers shooting people on the streets of Atlanta. These are members of the community shooting each other – and, in this case, it is the worst possible outcome.”
In Chicago, another father bore painful witness to the worst possible outcome: his baby being killed over the Fourth of July over some probable trivial dispute. Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was shot at a weekend party in her grandmother’s backyard. Nathan Wallace told reporters, “To see my daughter on the table with a gunshot wound to the forehead, that will change somebody’s life.”
Tyrone Muhammad, a Chicago activist and founder of the fledgling group “Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change,” works to change lives before the bullets fly. Muhammad knows both sides of the violence equation. He spent over two decades in prison for murder. He went in a hard-eyed gangster and came out determined to keep other young men from making the same disastrous trek from the South Side to steel bars. Here’s is what he said about all of the uproar with no action when it comes to senseless killings of Chicago babies:
Muhammad is unsteady about the politics and goals of Black Lives Matter as an organization. “Black Lives Matter is a political group that has so many political leanings that it clearly uses black death as a hustle. Black death is a hustle for a lot of these outside groups.”
A hustle, Tyrone Muhammad believes, that ignores the root of the problem driving what he calls a “swarm of civil war” engulfing America’s inner cities: fatherless homes, broken families, official corruption and complacent communities:
“It’s black men’s fault to allow black boys and black men to victimize their own communities and murder their children. We have to take personal responsibility.” He adds. “It should be commended whenever black men say, ‘It’s our responsibility to reduce violence.'”
Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot was swept into office last year by a citizenry desperate for change. The new big-city mayor is clearly rattled by the extreme violence wracking her city. After another weekend of bloodshed, Lightfoot declared, “Thoughts and prayers are simply not enough at this point. Sorrow itself is not enough.”
But for Mr. Anderson, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Wallace, and for the countless parents and families like them, prayers and sorrow are all they have for their black children whose lives dearly mattered.
“I’m kissing a picture,” Horace Sr. says through tears.
If the leaders of BLM truly want to impact the lives of black Americans, it should revise and broaden its mission. Americans have watched this year as BLM has flexed its muscles showing the world its potential to truly impact the preservation of the lives of young African Americans in the U.S., not just from a handful of racist policemen, but from senseless deaths at the hands of anyone, but primarily other blacks.
How callous are the leaders of BLM to ignore the cries of Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr. as he wept profoundly on Sean Hannity’s show? Did the life of Horace, Jr. not matter? What about eight-year-old Secoriea Turner who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time in Atlanta and caught a bullet in her forehead that instantly snuffed-out her life? Where was BLM in either of those cases? Painting its name on a street somewhere?
America’s social justice elites are quick to throw anyone under the bus for even questioning BLM’s motives in ignoring such African American killings at the hands of other blacks. Let’s be adults here: when it comes to the senseless slaughter of African Americans at the hands of ANYONE, enough is enough. $130 million for an organization that names itself Black Lives Matter should probably find a way to tackle the problem its “Name” says it tackles: deaths of blacks…PERIOD because black lives DIDN’T matter! Anything short of that is little more than another ethnic not-for-profit that exists to make noise, create havoc, which is content to light fires with no desire or efforts to put out the fires for the cause of meaningful change.
If Black Lives really matter, do something – whatever you can with whatever resources you can muster – to show a nation your group name is more than a call-sign used to spark fear among millions of Americans who simply don’t understand the BLM movement. Presently, Black Lives Matter looks exactly like dozens of other social groups from U.S. history that do little more than scorch the ground with little or no change.
I hope BLM does not hope that its acceptance will be based upon fear. Fear seldom accomplishes positive changes. America doesn’t need another one of those. There are far too many already in place to count. We need some group of people to activate whatever is necessary to assure every black American that truly, “Black Lives really DO Matter.”
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