#BlackLivesMatter… When Is This Madness Going To Stop?

What happens when protests can’t even happen peacefully?

It looks as if the situation is deteriorating rapidly. Protests have been held at various locations around the United States to demand justice for George Floyd. Stephen Jackson, a former professional basketball player, was a close friend of Floyd, and they looked so remarkably alike that they were classified as “twins”.

While in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for a rally, Jackson delivered a speech about Floyd:

“You can’t tell me, when that man has his knee on my brother’s neck — taking his life away, with his hand in his pocket — that that smirk on his face didn’t say, ‘I’m protected.’ You can’t tell me that he didn’t feel that it was his duty to murder my brother, and that he knew he was gonna get away with it. You can’t tell me that wasn’t the look on his face.”

That’s perfectly acceptable. We can see his emotions in there. But he chose to control them and seek justice for his slain brother.

But what is worrying, though, is that these protests can get out of hand — and none of it is the fault of the protest organisers.

In Los Angeles, California, for instance, another NBA player, JR Smith, was caught on camera beating up a white person. He was quoted as saying:

“One of these motherfu***ing white boys didn’t know where he was going and broke my f***ing window in my truck,” he says.

“Broke my s***. This is a residential area, no stores over here non of that s***.

It’s a very fair statement to make. He parked his vehicle in a residential area. It was far away from all the protest action. But when there are people who deliberately damage the property of innocent bystanders…

I’d say they ought to get the karma that they deserve.

While that violent incident does little to de-escalate the simmering racial tensions between the different ethnic cultures in the United States, let’s face it. The instigator did something that was uncalled for.

Similar things were observed in Oakland, California:

Asia Cruz, who joined the protests in Oakland Friday night, said she arrived to what looked like a peaceful protest, but then saw a group of about a dozen white men dressed in all black tearing down the boards that covered the window of a Chase Bank. A video she posted of the incident on Twitter has gone viral.

“They started breaking the glass, set off a firework in the bank, and started a fire,” she told BuzzFeed News. Then they moved to a Walgreens across the street and “did the same thing.”

“I noticed each time, once they were in and protesters began to move in [too], the men dressed in black left almost immediately, and then the peaceful protestors would be sprayed with tear gas,” Cruz recalled. “It seemed very organized.”

Are the black people not even allowed their rights to free speech anymore?

These white instigators are wilfully damaging property, looting and leaving just before the tear gas force comes in to spray the peaceful protestors.

Is there no end to this madness in sight?

Further driving wedges between the different population ethnicities does not help in reconciling the problem. Violence doesn’t help much, either.

The challenge is in achieving the reconciliation. Egos have to be swallowed; apologies have to be made; justice has to be served.

This issue has been simmering for such a long time, and it isn’t wise to keep on covering up everything else. Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives. Hispanic lives. Middle Eastern lives. Every human is as equally important as the next.

But when one’s attitude towards another human turns into trash, and they have to bear the consequences of that poor attitude — they richly deserve those consequences. The person who smashed JR Smith’s vehicle window made a pretty poor decision, and he will have to live with the consequences of getting beaten up.

We have to make choices and decisions on a daily basis.

Can we not make the choice to embrace people of different skin colours, religious beliefs and gender orientations? I don’t mean that we ought to take on their mindsets and beliefs. But we ought to understand where they’re coming from and why they have those beliefs and mindsets. It goes a long way towards fostering harmony among the diverse cultures that we are blessed with in this world.

The Angry Birds and the Pigs have forever been at loggerheads ever since Rovio first introduced the playable game Angry Birds. A hilarious Youtube video was created to spoof a peace treaty between the Birds and the Pigs, as can be viewed here.

While the content is lighthearted and hilarious, it does expose some deep rooted and uncomfortable truths that we have to face. All it takes is one incendiary, emotionally charged statement to swing the balance completely.

We do have a choice in how we wish to respond to unkind words.

We do have a choice in not adding any more inflammatory comments.

But when push comes to shove and the dam breaks because of all the festering resentment deep down inside, things can get really ugly really quickly.

This story is a continuation of #BlackLivesMatter — The Controversial Act Of Kneeling.