Tag / BLACK LIVES MATTER

by Ed Achorn

The outrage of the week

By Edward Achorn

I appear from time to time on a public television show in Rhode Island called “A Lively Experiment.” Each episode concludes with an outrage or kudo of the week from each guest.

My outrage this week was the attempted assassination of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in Compton, California. A suspect approached their car and shot them in the face.

Outside the hospital where they were taken, protesters (how quickly they are dispatched!) chanted, “Let them die!”

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by Ed Achorn

Cities mugged by reality

By Edward Achorn

Is it possible that politicians, after stoking hatred and division, are having second thoughts about rioting in their cities?

Months of massive Black Lives Matter protests — threatening police (“pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”) and calling for their defunding — have spun off rioting and looting. Neighborhoods have been wrecked, with billions of dollars of investment in cities destroyed. Black businesses have been wiped out, and black people killed.

As residents with money flee for safer places, some leaders fear their cities may never recover.

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by Ed Achorn

Americans oppose the riots

 By Edward Achorn

 The Summer of Hate shows no signs of abating. Night after night, people are being injured or killed and property destroyed. Thousands of young Americans, after being locked down for months, are erupting with savagery and destruction.

This has gone on for two months now.

As a historian of the Civil War, I can see where it leads.

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by Ed Achorn

Erasing Abraham Lincoln

By Edward Achorn

Abraham Lincoln is in the news again. A statue of Lincoln that has stood for over 100 years in Park Square in Boston is the latest target for historic obliteration.

The statue shows Lincoln standing above a crouching half-dressed black man in broken chains. The man is looking up with strength and determination, as if ready to rise.

With American cities in flames, and an all-out propaganda effort underway to depict America as systemically racist, the time seems ripe to destroy symbols of American history that were once deemed to celebrate freedom and its inseparable companion, courage.

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by Ed Achorn

Knavery at universities

By Edward Achorn

It makes me sad, if not anguished, to see liberal values under constant assault on college campuses. Rising totalitarianism, political conformity, and bullying are taking over, with the blessings of administrators who are worried about protecting their own careers. This is occurring, sadly, at our most distinguished institutions.

Administrators and many faculty members are retreating from the thing that once made colleges great: free and fearless intellectual inquiry.

And they are retreating from something else. Common decency.

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by Ed Achorn

Black lives really should matter

By Edward Achorn

Black lives matter, virtually every American believes. Unfortunately, some of the people carrying that banner seem to be advocating policies that have the opposite effect of protecting black lives.

Vast majorities of Americans, thank God, still believe in equal justice under the law, which is the American ideal. Virtually no one wants police officers to bully and kill minorities (or even whites). The outpouring of grief and outrage by Americans across the political spectrum after the death of George Floyd argued that point. They care and want things to be better.

But making the latest act of police brutality emblematic of the American people is not only a gross distortion of reality but a prescription for disaster, including for black Americans.

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