Observing the phenomenon of the Black Lives Matter movement from the sidelines it’s difficult to ignore the massive disconnect between the two sides, both in media coverage and the interaction of activists on the streets. Few things have served to encapsulate this division more than the tendency of supporters of the movement to to cry havoc when anyone says “All lives matter” and the utter disbelief on the faces of everyone else that anyone could disagree with that sentiment. Still, the argument continues to be made on a regular basis with increasingly odd analogies being offered to explain the breakdown in communications. Another of these showed up this weekend from Leonard Pitts, who seems to have been incensed by Mike Huckabee’s observation that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King would be “appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others.” Pitts sought to finally describe the situation in medical terms. (Miami Herald)

“Elevating some lives.” Lord, have mercy.

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. It’s not about “elevating some lives” any more than it would be about elevating some bones. Rather, it’s about treating where it hurts.

That’s a remarkable piece of thinking, if completely off the mark in terms of addressing the objections being raised. As with many analogies, it probably sounds somewhat appealing until you really stop to think about it. But even in this hypothetical situation Pitts seems to be unwittingly proving the point of some of his critics. If you show up at a doctor’s office with a mangled wrist, any competent doctor is going to want to know how it got that way. And if you did damage to one part of your body in some violent accident, there may well be other problems which you haven’t noticed yet since you’re just focusing on the fact that your wrist is causing you a lot of pain. I’ll let Moe Lane explain that portion a bit further. (RedState)

..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*.

The reality we’re dealing with here is actually one which doesn’t fit the metaphor very well at all, though Moe does a good job of attempting to force it. You see, the patient doesn’t just have a broken wrist. The patient has a lot of other very serious medical problems but you’re just screaming to have them look at one fracture between the carpus and the ulna. The “wrist” in Pitts’ analogy is the occasional black person who is unjustly killed by a police officer. As we’ve said every single time this dead horse is dragged forth for another beating, this does happen on occasion and it needs to be addressed. Better training, body cameras and more actively engaged communities which are less tolerant of crime and violence are all steps toward addressing the issue.

But you can’t treat the patient doing this in a vacuum. The rest of the “bones” do need to be looked at. There have been something more than 400 cases of lethal force by police in the United States this year. How many of them can you name? I’m guessing roughly a half a dozen if you really think about it and don’t go hit Google immediately. There’s a reason for that. First of all, the majority of them were white. It’s not a proportional majority as compared to the population, but that’s still the truth. And for the non-white individuals in such incidents, only a vanishingly small number of them wind up being questionable enough to make headlines. Of those, complaints are raised and protests lodged in the streets for cases where it turns out to be an obvious case of justified use of lethal force.

The remaining number where it was clearly either a horrible mistake or an egregious case of brutality, such as the case of Walter Scott, is what should be dealt with. That number is too high if it’s higher than one, but it’s not the epidemic that it’s being made out to be. (And for the record, the cop who shot Walter Scott is charged with murder.) And yet every time the name of someone like Scott is invoked, we are given the total number of black suspects who are killed and then lectured on how it’s a “culture of violence against young black men” or flat out accusations of systemic racism.

Even when an officer involved shooting winds up being completely cleared at every level from the local to the federal, such as was the case with Michael Brown, the same names are trotted out over and over again, evidence be damned, as an indictment of the entire system. Take for example this recent op-ed by one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement where she explains that nobody else will be allowed to speak until their demands are met and how they are working in the memory of the fallen. (Washington Post… some emphasis added)

On Aug. 8, 2015, as the Black community prepared to collectively mourn the anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown by Ferguson police, members of Black Lives Matter disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle. In the week since that disruption, at least nine Black people have been killed by state-sanctioned violence. Do we know the names of the nine people who faced a trial by fire? Do we know how the loss of their lives has impacted their families and communities? Or are we so collectively focused on the feelings of White presidential candidates that we have missed the essential purpose of the disruption? We as a movement will continue to disrupt the current political process until Black Lives Matter.

Those are the words of Patrisse Cullors, self-appointed spokesperson for the movement. She still speaks of “the murder of Mike Brown” as if it wasn’t proven that he attacked a police officer on his way back from a robbery. She fires off a number of other suspects “killed by state sanctioned violence” as if none of them were criminals who engaged in violent encounters with the police. Context is not only forgotten, but hidden in an effort to push forward the agenda. And their response is to “disrupt the process” until they get their way.

Is any of this sinking in? Can you understand why “all lives matter” is, in fact, more important than any subset of those lives? And that police lives matter also? Every one of these misguided and threatening articles I read has me feeling less and less sympathy for this “movement” even though there are certainly some who have had legitimate grievances which need to be addressed.