Imagine for a moment that you broke your left wrist. In excruciating pain, you rush to the emergency room for treatment only to run into a doctor who insists on examining not just your mangled left wrist, but your uninjured right wrist, rib cage, femur, fibula, sacrum, humerus, phalanges, the whole bag of bones that is you. You say, “Doc, it’s just my left wrist that hurts.” And she says, “Hey, all bones matter.”
If you understand why that remark would be factual, yet also, fatuous, silly, patronizing and off point, then you should understand why “All lives matter” is the same.
…or you’re not a doctor who knows pretty darn well that when somebody shows up in your emergency room with a ‘mangled right wrist’ then you had better make sure that the patient doesn’t, you know, have other broken bones. Or a concussion. Or internal bleeding. Or… you get the point, right? Because, yes, in case all bones do matter, including the ones that you didn’t check because somebody was screaming in your face about how you have to concentrate on cracked wrists until the end of time*.
Yes, I understand: it’s just a stupid metaphor. Indeed. It is a stupid metaphor, which is why Leonard Pitts, Jr. should have used a different one. It’s also being used to support an argument that isn’t nearly as popular as its adherents pretend it is:
Two out of three black people prefer the term “all lives matter” to “black lives matter,” according to aRasmussen poll released Thursday.
Only 31 percent of black people surveyed said that the statement “black lives matter” most closely comports to their own beliefs, compared to 64 percent who chose “all lives matter.”
This does not necessarily make the entire Black Lives Matter movement invalid: as my RedState colleague and friend Leon Wolf noted a few days ago, there are serious questions that can be and should be asked about police behavior, as well as our current criminal justice system. What it does suggest, however, is that – as usual – the Usual Suspects are busily trying to turn the whole thing into yet another way to squeeze a few more votes out for Democrats. We’ve seen this tactic before, and we’ll probably see it again.
*Go ask an emergency room physician or nurse just how good the average patient is at describing how and where he or she hurts. Seriously. Go ahead. If you don’t already know the answer, you’ll probably find it rather enlightening.
V
