Saturday, December 6, 2014

Life matters, no matter the packaging.

There's a hashtag floating around, #blacklivesmatter and for some reason it has been a bit of a craw in my side and I couldn't figure out why. I think part of it is because the racism running rampant in our country angers me. But I also think that if there are going to be protests over things like police officers overstepping or using excessive force, then there should be protests over the neighborhood thugs doing the same. There should be protests over the incredibly low breastfeeding rates among black mothers, when it's a well-documented fact that breastfeeding a baby generally contributes to healthier children overall. There should be protests over the incredibly high abortion rates among black women versus other races. If black lives matter, then ALL black lives should matter from conception to natural death. If black lives matter, why is abortion so acceptable when it's involving an unborn baby whose heart starts beating right about the time a woman realizes she's late for her menstrual cycle, but it's unacceptable to cause enough harm to make that same heart stop beating once the person is born?
Page 6 of this report from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene breaks down the numbers by age, borough, race, and pregnancy outcome. It's eye-opening. This is JUST in New York City.
Where is the outrage over the loss of life at the hands of others across the board? Why are only the police vilified when every single day across this nation, not one person stands up on behalf of their neighbors who are killed at the hands of other citizens, often the same race as the victim? What makes the lives of the born more valuable than the unborn?

If you want to be one of the voices crying out that black lives matter, lets make sure there's an accounting for ALL black lives lost, born or unborn. Let's make sure we're calling into question everyone who is ending the heartbeats of other black lives regardless of the job title they hold. Let's go one step beyond that, and declare that ALL lives matter regardless of the outer package containing that life.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

it's easy to throw stones when your on the outside looking in!!! instead of getting all your so called "facts" from your statistics you probably got off the first Google page that popped up in your search... how about spending some time with the people and really see and hear what's going on in BLACK COMMUNITY!!!!

Feisty Irish Wench said...

Perhaps you could make yourself known to me instead of hiding behind an anonymous comment on my blog.
It's easy to make assumptions about people on the internet when all you're seeing about them is what they put there for you to read.
And let me share just one of my experiences of folks from the black community. A family was walking in the store parking lot, groceries in one cart, 2 kids in the other, and a third child a few steps ahead of his parents. His dad called out to watch out for white people, because they'll run his ass over for being black. I saw a family. That little boy's dad saw skin pigment. Now, tell me who was the racist in that situation?
Since you want to call out the source of the report, based on a link url, here is the source of those reports, from the "horse" itself. http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/vs-summary.shtml

It's the identical report posted on the NYC.gov site as it is the news source site.

Maybe if you weren't so busy going around the internet calling people racists while hiding behind anonymous comments, you'd have time to actually look at the numbers as they're broken down in the report, and then go back and ask your neighbors why they have no problem with ending the lives of unborn babies, killing fellow black community members, and ostracizing themselves from the world with vitriolic behavior, while decrying the actions of other races. You can't ignore the behavior in the black community, and get angry when other races treat yours poorly. It's pretty much the same as what is laid out in Matthew 7:3-5.