I will not say “Jewish Lives Matter,” because all lives matter.
(Please read to the end of my rant before you send the hate mail.)
Are you disturbed because I won’t say “Jewish Lives Matter?” Am I anti-Semitic, or worse? I’m making a point.
Palestinian lives matter.
Black lives matter.
Jewish lives matter.
The names and identities of people we don’t know matter.
I’m not playing a psychological game where I try to make you admit that suddenly “All Lives Matter” seems an empty evasion when you compare the lives that are special to you to everyone else’s. It makes you think, though, doesn’t it?
I’m not setting up the “Oppression Olympics,” where I form exquisitely-parsed metrics to determine who suffers/suffered most, and how, and when, and at whose hands. Jews have suffered. Palestinians have suffered. Indigenous people in the Americas have suffered from Nunavut, Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Africans suffered in the Americas, in some places in Europe, and on their own continent at their own hands, but mostly at the hands of others. Europeans painted themselves and fought one another over territories that were not marked by printed lines.
