All lives matter.
But you wouldn’t offer the rope to everyone in the swimming pool if only one person were drowning.
You wouldn’t give everyone the Heimlich manoeuvre in turn if only one person were choking.
You wouldn’t even give everyone a plaster if only one person had cut their finger.
Fair does not mean equal.
Now, fair means that we have to take a long, hard look at ourselves and realise what we have done. Fair means that we have to accept that we have not been fair; that it has not been OK. Fair means that we have to swallow the bitter pill that it is an undeserved privilege that some of us are born to believe we are ‘better’ because we wear a different skin suit.
Fair means that we have to recognise the murder of a man on a street just because of his cultural heritage as being an act committed by all of us. That we have to realise that our behaviour means that there are people in this world who believe that cold blooded, pre-meditated murder can be committed in broad daylight and nobody will bat an eyelid.
Because it is the lack of eyelid batting that has got us here. It is the fact that four people – four supposedly ordinary people – four people who have been employed to ensure that the law is kept believe that it’s OK to murder somebody who might not even have done anything wrong.
Let’s face it: it wouldn’t have happened if they knew that they would be vilified by society. It probably wouldn’t have happened if they’d have known they’d be arrested. It probably wouldn’t have happened if just one of those four officers had stood up for the rights of another human being.
It probably wouldn’t have happened if George Floyd were white.
And that is why black lives matter. Black lives must matter because white lives have done so much to destroy that belief. Black lives must matter because we have created a world in which they – evidentially – don’t.
I will never understand. I was born lucky. Not more talented; kinder; more beautiful; more anything. Just white. And so I will never have to endure the pain that is to understand.
But I am not too old, or too proud, or too selfish to stand up and think. To realise that I am part of something that has done so much wrong; that has led us to this.
I am not too proud to say sorry.
Black lives matter.
Wot I Learnt 