Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Black Lives Matter and Alcoholics Anonymous

I was pressing the usual black press in which black people are basically agency-less in the things that "happen to them" when I was struck by a parallel situation: Alcoholics Anonymous. Imagine this scenario if you will:

Imagine a drunkard who ends up in a AA session. the moderator (or whatever they are called) asks who is an alcoholic. Everybody raises their hands except the drunkard. Everybody in the room would know that the drunkard is in denial. Indeed one of the first steps is to admit you have a problem.

Then imagine that during this session the drunkard is asked who is responsible for their state and the drunkard were to reply that it was the fault of Coors, Amstel, Budweiser, etc. Because had they not ever produced the beverages in question he could not have gotten drunk in the first place.

Again everyone would agree that the drunkard is in denial. No on comes out of AA with the idea that the fault of their addiction lies with the product they abused. Imagine again if the drunkard continued on to say that it was also the fault of the stores that sold the alcohol as well as the bars that serve alcohol. Would that kind of attitude fly in AA?

Say if that drunkard went even further and said that the people who arrested him for disorderly conduct as a result of his drunkeness were really the problem. And furthermore the fault of the person he killed while driving drunk actually lied with all the producers of alcohol and the stores that sell it. No one would take this guy seriously. Why? Because in AA you are not allowed to externalize blame for your own behavior

Now lets go back to the Black Lives Matter movement. They blame guns (alcohol). They blame gun stores and sellers (the bars). When the police come to apprehend a black person who has committed a crime and somebody gets hurt or killed because they failed to cooperate it isn't their fault. It is the police's fault. And here's the thing, like alcoholism, most black people are NOT victims of these things. MOst people fall into these camps:

1) totally abstain. There could be alcohol in every store and a bar with free alcohol and abstainers would never get drunk.

2) Drink occasionally. These folks drink whenever they feel like it. Most of the time they don't feel like it so they don't drink most of the time.

3) Party drinkers: They may drink to the point of drunk at a party and need a ride home but other than that they don't have a problem.

Very few people fall into this last category: Drunk: Cannot go without a drink for x amount of hours and plan their lives around drinking. The mere fact that the vast majority of people have no problems with alcohol proves that it is not the presence of alcohol or bars that is the problem. Similarly the simple fact that millions and millions of black folks have encounters with police that do not go badly shows that police are not the problem. Does that mean that there are no police who are bad actors? Of course not, but when the majority of black deaths by assaults are committed by other blacks and this happens at a rate 7X the white population and God only knows the rate of the Asian population, you gotta wonder what exactly is the real deal behind the Black Lives Matter movement. 'Cause if the BLM was assigned to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and did all that "it's the store's fault" type of talk, no one would take them seriously. There would be 100%B consensus that they were in denial. Yet nobody in the mainstream press will treat them like the grown ups that would be expected of a recovering alcoholic.