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I really hesitate to publish this. I know my view is not popular. Along with the stresses and strains of COVID-19 habitation, now we have social/racial upheaval as well, as globally consuming as the virus has been. Much of it has occurred because of mindless ‘passions’, and unquestionably, many people have come out in support of one movement or another because it has become the trend. People speak out from anger – anger which often appears to have nothing to do with the issue being protested. Most of it is meaningless. Waving a poster, blacking out your webpage for a day, marching in the street (peacefully or not) doesn’t change anything. Peculiarly, people who voice no opinion at all are taken to task for not speaking out.

I do not come out for or against any movement. I know that racism is rampant, and that it is not unidirectional. I’m a WASP in a Hispanic neighbourhood, and I’ve never been welcome – I’ve been made to feel how unacceptable my ‘whiteness’ is in this area. I’ve been thrown out of ethnic food shops simply because we didn’t share ethnicity. To rebut ‘Black Lives Matter’ with ‘All Lives Matter’ gets responses such as ‘You can’t say that crap. YOU did this.’

People are blaming ALL whites for the actions of a few, sometimes hundreds of years ago. This makes no more sense than saying that All Blacks or All Hispanics are such-and-such, because of a few.

I find almost no references to the treatment of the Muslims or the Jews, I suppose because they don’t qualify as actual races. I don’t see much in the way of protest for Native Americans, who even to-day experience discrimination in their own country. Perhaps people just aren’t angry enough about them to bother.

What I see very little of is the acknowledgement that all lives matter, and that the issue is not the abuse of any particular race, but of human finding a reason to mistreat, abuse, kill another human. It seems to be a quality of the Human Race – we have to find a reason to exclude others. At the beginning of time, there was good reason for this, but to-day, there is no good reason. Ask anyone who’s been in combat – your survival may depend on the actions of people who differ from you.

The nations of the world are fragmented by finding distinctions between races, religions, genders.… The list is endless. There can never be one nation, one global community with that sort of thinking.

Our mindsets must change. We need live our beliefs, not just mouth them, or be quiet. There can’t be equality when one group is seen as the underdog. There can’t be global unity when people are insisting on special group recognition. It isn’t limited to race – these distinctions are everywhere.

The real issue is that of Human abusing Human. The only colour that matters is RED, because that is the colour that runs through everyone’s veins. 

Paul TN Chapman

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