Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
I hope you don’t continue with LM#5.
The smart-aleck response from the BLM crowd when someone says “All Lives Matter” (that is, the response they give other than violent assault and arson) is to say, “If my house is in your neighborhood and my house is on fire, you don’t walk around saying, ‘All Houses Matter’ – you try to help me put out the fire in my house. At that point in time, my house is what we need to focus on!” Surely some Think Tank somewhere came up with this response because the normal proponents of BLM aren’t clever enough to craft such absurdities – they just parrot what they’re given. Trying to argue or reason with these morons is an absolute waste of time (the old adage “One cannot have a battle of wits with an opponent who is unarmed” applies in spades) However, I would enjoy it if someone responded, “Yes, but it seems like instead of trying to put the fire in your own house out you’d rather just burn down everyone else’s house. After you hit them in the head with a brick.”
That last is a perfect analogy. The other thing that seems lost in the Think Tank response is the fact that a transcontinental nation peopled by hundreds of millions is not a neighborhood.
“a transcontinental nation peopled by hundreds of millions is not a neighborhood.”
Yes. I’m reminded of Dr. Fleming’s example that towards the end of his life, Jefferson thought that most political decisions should be made at the ward level. Even a “ward” in a modern city is too large to be considered a neighborhood, but the ward level is about as large as any person could reasonably be expected to care about.