Bad Apples
My emotions are raw. I'll admit this first.
It doesn't really matter to me what preceded Jacob Blake being shot 7 times in the back.
It just doesn't.
I'm also not sorry if that doesn't fit your narrative.
Perhaps Jacob Blake shouldn't have walked away from the police. I would always advise listening to a police officer and doing what they say to do. Not complying though, shouldn't lead to executions in the street.
I don't know what was said between Jacob Blake and the police officers, and I'm not sure how many people do. I don't know why guns were drawn in the first place. What I do know is that Jacob Blake was shot seven times at point-blank range.
Literally, the officer had his hand on Jacob Blake's shirt when he fired his first shots.
In front of his children.
If this is just the act of a "few bad apples", why does this keep happening? Why are so many willing to jump to that bad apple's defense over the man lying in a hospital bed with a severed spinal cord facing the potential of never walking again?
Why can't we remove the bad apples from the bunch?
It's always interesting to me to see supposedly pro-life individuals defending the use of guns to kill other people. It doesn't compute.
As far as athletes boycotting games - I support them. Mostly because it is their right to do so. If peacefully kneeling doesn't create the necessary changes, then other options must be considered.
As a diehard sports fan, with the NBA being my favorite league, I'll say this: if you feel inconvenienced by players not playing their games, maybe it's time to re-think your priorities.
If you wish you could watch them play because they provide a nice distraction for you, that's precisely the point. Now is not the time to be entertained.
Now is not the time to be distracted.
We hear all the time that athletes should "just stick to sports". I'm still trying to understand that in a logical, rational sense.
It's silly. Maybe we should start telling electricians to "stick to electrical work", or plumbers to "stick to plumbing". Should we tell our pastors to "stick to Bible stuff"?
Who gets to decide what other people's opinions are? Who gets to decide how someone else should use their platform?
Don't want to be bothered? Neither do I, but I also don't want to end up as another name with a hashtag.
This shouldn't be about Black people vs. White people. It shouldn't be a liberal vs. conservative argument. For me, it's not an anti-police argument. What it is though, is a plea for all of us to work towards meaningful change in this country. Where we ALL have equal opportunities, where we ALL can move freely without fear of brutality in the back of our minds.
Jacob Blake's mother said it best when she pleaded for all of us to "use our hearts, our love and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other"
Let's start doing that.
- JG