The Irrelevance of Black Lives Matter

Of all the woes one can cast upon the United States, among the worst is its citizens' widespread lack of historical knowledge.  If only people really knew what's happened in the past, they'd be a lot less fearful of their present.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, teachers, administrators and school superintendents decided that gender studies was more important than understanding the Constitution, so now we have a Nation of Children who are more focused on their genitals than on their life goals, freedoms and liberties.

Of course, being the boomer that I am, I harbor no such misalignments of priorities.  I prefer to sit on my porch, chuckling over the repetition of foolishness throughout the ages.  I watch with amusement as others wring their hands over everything from diseases to politics and race wars, all the while knowing the eventual outcome -- because it has all happened before.

Oh, sure, there are those who believe that Antifa and Black Lives Matter are for real.  I agree, they are real.  But they're certainly nothing to be taken any more seriously than their predecessors, because if you know your American history, you'd agree that these types of organizations generally have desperately short half-lives.  They're here one year and gone the next. 

Don't believe me?  Read on a bit and see if you don't agree:

Remember when Bernie Sanders was going to change the country -- twice?  There was a time that Bernie Bro's were swelling college campuses with their message of "free everything."  Sanders took a commanding presence in the primaries of 2016 and 2020.  But then what happened?  Nothing.  Thousands of young people flushed away years of their lives and got sold out.  Now they're nothing but five years older with nothing to show for it.  The same thing happened in 1972, when George McGovern and his anti-Vietnam War youths were supposed to wipe out Richard Nixon.  Even with the new 18 year old vote, that plan didn't go so well:  Nixon won 49 states.  McGovern won one state and Washington, D.C.

In 1968, Jerry Rubin painted himself up as a latter day Ché Guevara, declared himself a Yippie and led the riots at the Democratic National Convention as one of the infamous Chicago Seven.  What you may not realize is that just a few short years later, Rubin got a haircut, traded in his headband and poncho for a three-piece business suit and took a job on Wall Street as an investment analyst.

How about Linda Sarsour's Women's March? Lots of feminists marching down streets chanting and yelling. Lots of media attention.  But at the end of the day, aside from knitted hats that were, at best, a questionable fashion statement, what did they accomplish?  If anything, the march turned feminism into a cartoon, dismissed by the public and evaporating from view.  No new legislation.  No new anything.  A big zero.

Now the same things are happening with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.  Don't get me wrong, there are way too many people getting punched and killed.  Too much property being destroyed.  Too many elected officials abdicating their oaths, for sure.  However, when you really look at either organization, what have either really accomplished?  Nothing, with the possible exception of some temporary intimidation, and that's nothing new.  If you really want to see racial intimidation done by the master, look no further than Jesse Jackson, whose talent for racial arm-twisting remains unparalleled to this day.  When he was in his prime, the mere threat of a Jackson march on Washington, D.C., was enough to garner him and his family all kinds of cash and prizes, including a Budweiser distributorship in Illinois and much, much more. These guys today?  They don't even know enough to muscle a piece of the pie.  They show up, get some air time, collect a check and go home.

Yes, it's really that simple, and you don't have to go back much further than the 1960s to see this, either.  Anyone remember the Black Panthers?  They're dust.  What did they accomplish?  Nothing. The Ku Klux Klan?  Destroyed by the FBI.  What did they accomplish? Nothing.  Hippies?  Long haired in the 1970s, flipping real estate by the 1980s.  What did they accomplish? Nothing. And that's just in the last 50 years.  If you know your American history, you can see this stuff cropping up about every 50 years or so, but nothing ever really lasts, because in our society, change is brought about by evolution not revolution.

Let's see where Black Lives Matter and Antifa are in a few years -- that's if you can find them.

If history proves anything, it's that media is always looking for the next big story so it can sell more advertising.  Not all of them make it.  Murder hornets, for example, didn't play.  But pandemics, racism, political disinformation -- none of it is new.  And in the long run, none of it is relevant.

We're America.  We endure.  We survive -- no matter how irrelevant the threat actually may be.