Every once in a while, I look around at the lunacy becoming ever more prevalent in our society, and I find myself needing to do a civics lesson. My last civics lesson was on the Freedom of Speech. This one will be on an even more basic truth: you are what you do.
People have no intrinsic value. That’s not to say life has no intrinsic value (of course it does), but it is to say that the value of a life is based on the value that life adds to the world around it. The Covid-19 virus is alive, and it detracts value from the world, so it has a negative value. The world would be better off without it Covid-19.
There are some people the world would have been better off without. Adolf Hitler comes to mind, as do Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and a host of others. Imagine, for example, what the world would look like today had the Federal Reserve never caused the Great Depression, and the Wiemar Republic had survived. Hitler would never have been more than a street painter, and WWII would never have happened.
People have no intrinsic value. You are what you do.
Many today like to virtue signal, and the in-vogue way to virtue signal is to back the organization called ‘Black Lives Matter.’ One common refrain is ‘Silence is Violence.’
Now, before I tear Black Lives Matter to shreds, let me state that of course black lives matter, in the same way that all other lives matter. Lives matter, irrespective of race.
Because lives matter, those who serve and protect lives matter. That would be the police.
George Floyd once broke into the house of a pregnant woman and held a gun to her stomach, while his friends robbed her. George Floyd did not deserve to die for floating a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, while strung out on Cocaine and Fentanyl, but let’s stop pretending that the man was some kind of saint.
Rayshard Brooks was pointing a stun-gun at a police officer when he was shot by the police, and was out on parole (thanks to Covid-19) after having been found guilty of false imprisonment (of his wife), and of repeatedly beating his family. Let’s stop pretending that he was a ‘devoted family man’.
Chicago, in the meantime, saw 104 people shot, with 15 shot fatally, including several children, during a weekend ‘blue flu’ in which the police did exactly what Black Lives Matter wants them to do – which is to say that the police did nothing.
According to the Washington Post’s database on police shootings, nine unarmed black people were killed by the police in 2019 (NOTE: this was changed to 15 on June First when the Washington Post altered its definition of ‘unarmed’). That’s nation wide, and a full year. Fifteen were shot dead in Chicago in one weekend, thanks to the cops doing exactly what they are being asked to do, and staying away.
The whole country flips out whenever there is a mass shooting, and rightfully so. Chicago has the equivalent of a mass shooting every weekend, and nobody says a word.
Silence is violence – remember?
Black Lives Matter is encouraging violent crime. Those who are thinking about supporting this organization need to remember that people have no intrinsic value. You are what you do, and what Black Lives Matter does is to encourage violent crime.
People support Black Lives Matter for the same reason people used to support Jim Crow, which is to say that the reason people support Black Lives Matter is to tell themselves (and the rest of the world) that they are better than other people. The whole point of virtue signaling is to tell the world that you are better than other people, and in this case, a very large number of people are protesting in favor of violent crime, to show the world how virtuous they are.
You are what you do, and if you put the need to signal your own virtue ahead of the lives of the fifteen people shot dead in Chicago last weekend – guess what your value is…
I wrote this article. I am what I do. Some people are going to applaud me for having written this, and others are going to attack me for having done so. All I can say is that if silence is violence, then I’m speaking out against violent crime.
I’m happy to speak out against police brutality too, when it occurs, but I am not going to stand by while people claim that police brutality is endemic. We have an incredibly professional police force, and I am proud to look at the police as friends.
If you are a police officer, then know that ‘silence is violence’, and I’ve got your back.
There were 16,214 murders in America in 2018 (the most recent year available). There were also a lot of rapes, muggings, and other forms of violent crime. When I put the lives saved by police against the number of unarmed black men that Black Lives Matter is demanding the police disband over, the math to me looks pretty plain: 16,214 > 9 (I understand that this is a third grade level civics lesson, so for those who need it, the ‘>’ sign is called the ‘is greater than’ sign, and like an alligator, the ‘is greater than’ and ‘is less than’ signs, always want to eat the bigger number).
Of course, when I say that ‘you are what you do,’ I don’t mean you are just one thing. We are all the composite of all that we do, over the course of our lives. Those who make the world a better place overall, are good people, overall. Those who make the world worse overall, are bad people, overall. If your life were weighed today, would you have to say that the most important thing you ever did was to protest the police, in support of violent crime?
Thomas Jefferson deserves to be judged in the same light. On the one hand, he owned slaves. On the other hand, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, served as the Third President of the United States, established the United States Military Academy at West Point, doubled the size of the United States, abolished the slave trade, helped establish the Library of Congress, and founded the University of Virginia.
Does the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves morally outweigh everything else he did? Does it outweigh the fact that he also ended the slave trade? Life is rarely as simple as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Whatever the answers, Thomas Jefferson deserves to be remembered for what he did – both good and bad. We all deserve the same. We deserve neither more, nor less than that.
Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA are communist organizations, which you can easily tell by looking at their published lists of demands (or by clicking on the links I attached to their names). Is communism a good thing? Considering that it has killed more people than smallpox, I’m going to go with ‘no’. If you support communism, then you are what you do, and you support a philosophy of genocide.
You have no intrinsic value, and the world owes you nothing. You are what you do, so if you want to have value, do something good. Support freedom. Support liberty. Consider joining the Sons of Liberty, or some other anti-totalitarian movement.
Do something that matters. Do something good. Don’t be satisfied with doing something easy either, like joining the latest fad. Protesting as a part of a movement you don’t really understand is easy, but though doing so may make you feel good, it may very well not be doing the world any good at all, and it may, in fact, be doing great harm. Don’t be satisfied with feeling good. Make sure you are actually doing good. Doing good is often unpopular, but at the end of the day, you are not what you feel – you are what you do.
And if you really do believe that black lives matter, support the police in bringing violent crime rates back down.