BLACK LIVES MATTER

Above you see the front window of our house.

The first thing you need to know is that in this house, Black lives and Brown lives and LGBTQ lives matter.

And so in this house, in this publishing company, there is no hate. And we reject the presidential notion that there are good people on both sides of a race-bashing incident. There are not.

Black lives matter.

It does not mean that any other lives do not matter. That is a spurious argument designed only to stop attention being paid to the inherent racism present in this country. All lives matter, but we need to work on making sure that, in the USA, they matter equally, and are treated equally. Currently, sadly, they are not. The slogan “Black lives matter” is important to help us all realize we need to work on bringing Black lives up to the same standard as White lives.

As a nation, we all, all of us, have to stop killing people, or allowing people to be killed, simply because of the color of their skin. We have to stop giving them extra jail time because of the color of their skin. We Whites have to stop denying we have privilege, and have to stop using our privilege to only lift ourselves. We can’t keep almost half of Americans down, and hope that, at the same time, America itself can rise.

ALL lives, all humans matter equally. All people are beautiful and worthwhile. This is our value.

The United States can do nothing but fail as long as it treats half of its people unfairly. And Dave and Dianne will vote, as we always do, against anyone who does not agree.