OPINION:
It’s a crazy world we’re living in. On the opening night of the delayed 2020 baseball season, I spotted the New York Yankees wearing “Black Lives Matter” batting-practice shirts during their pre-game warmups. It appears the entire team was unanimous in making this decision.
What bothers me about this supposed stand against injustice is that the Black Lives Matter movement was built on a lie. In 2014, a Black teenager with an already long criminal history was shot in self-defense by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer. It was initially stated that the teenager surrendered to the cop by saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Subsequently, this narrative was deemed a lie by the district attorney, yet a national movement gained traction nonetheless. Why would anyone, including the Yankees — the most prestigious baseball team of all time — want to associate themselves with a known lie?
To compound matters, since 2014 BLM has morphed into an anti-police, anti-American, Marxist organization that intimidates free speech and the free assembly of non-violent Americans while looting and burning mostly Democratic-run cities that turn a blind eye to their lawlessness. How can the Yankees endorse a movement that advocates for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
Ironically, one of the main tenets of the BLM movement is that it “fights against systemic racism,” primarily because of police brutality. So far this year, more than 400 Black residents of Chicago have been slaughtered — not one of them by a White police officer, but rather by violent, mostly Black gang members. To say that racist police brutality should be the focus of the Black community while this rampant Black-on-Black crime goes unchecked is tantamount to a doctor having a stage-4 cancer patient and applying all his potentially life-saving efforts to healing a hangnail. If there’s anything “systemic” that needs to be addressed in the Black community, it is the generations-long scourge of the Black male adult abdicating his paternal role in the household, thus leading to the rise of these criminal gangs that hold cities under siege. Even more ironically, the first president in generations who has been trying to fix this “systemic” problem by providing a burgeoning economy that had produced the lowest unemployment rate for all minorities is the one who has been labeled a racist.
EUGENE R. DUNN
Medford, N.Y.
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