For the past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with so many emotions and thoughts. I have tried again and again to coherently put it all into words, but every time I do there is another tragedy to throw me off track.

As most of you know, I am rarely quiet about my opinions, although those closest to me probably wish I were. For weeks I’ve watched as friends from all walks of life have posted their opinions about these tragedies. I’ve read some proclaiming to “unfriend” anyone who doesn’t share their opinion, while others post what seems to be their first controversial post ever as they claim to finally be “breaking their silence”. I am watching as people finally express their opinions and take a stance for what they believe in, yet for the first time I have found myself speechless.

With all that has happened in the past few months, and, more accurately, through all of our history as a nation, I feel compelled to try to find a solution. I create arguments in my head and hope that one of them will provide the necessary clarity to convince “the other side” why they are entirely wrong, often racist, and seemingly fueled by hate. But the reality is, they don’t see it that way. You can argue until you are blue in the face, but no one is going to believe that he or she is the bad guy. All of us truly believe we are the good guys. This is why nothing ever gets accomplished.

An example of this is when people use “All Lives Matter” as a counter to the “Black Lives Matter” campaign. My personal belief is that “All Lives Matter” is subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, accomplishing nothing but changing the conversation. Even with the conversation redirected, the harsh reality is still that injustice lives in the system and how it treats black people. When a police officer gets killed in the line of duty, although tragic, it is not an injustice. It is not and should never be that being murdered as a black person during a routine traffic stop is just a tragedy. A police officer never wants to die doing his job, but he understands the risks involved when leaving his home because his job, by its nature, is dangerous. Leaving your house as a black person should not have to be dangerous. The mere fact that we are treating these two murders equally, shows our injustice. Would you compare an officer dying in a shoot-out to a child being killed in a mass-shooting by a deranged individual? The answer is no. The circumstances of these deaths are not equal, although both terrible. The child’s death should have been preventable. The child’s death was due to circumstances out of the child’s control. When a police officer dies in the line of duty, he dies protecting people like that child. He dies doing the job for which he spent years training. Although his death can be due to reasons out of his control, he still has the expectation that he could die. He dies with the honor of knowing he risked his life and paid the ultimate price. He is given a hero’s funeral. The child is not considered a hero because that child was helpless. That child did not know he or she would die that day. That child’s death was an unpredictable tragedy. In this scenario, that child represents our black brothers and sisters. By saying All Lives Matter, we are attempting to equate these situations, and thus end up ignoring what makes something an injustice, rather than a tragedy.

The issue with society is rather simple, yet extremely complicated. The issue is that we are all too selfish and self-centered to put ourselves in the shoes of “the other”. Instead of listening to someone’s story of suffering, we spend the entire conversation thinking of ways to relate. It is inherently human to look for similarities so we can better understand what someone else is battling. The flaw with this is in our thought process. Instead of sympathize with the other, we look to empathize and inadvertently change the conversation to include our own suffering. We lose our ability to truly empathize in the process. An example, “I met a man who was so poor he couldn’t afford to feed himself. He only has $20 in food stamps each month because he makes too much in SSDI. I totally understand his hardship because I also find it difficult to feed myself and my family! The difference is that I don’t even have food stamps and I have three children.”

Although empathy can be a beautiful thing, it is not supposed to be a comparison. True empathy is the ability to feel the pain of another as if it were your own. It is not using your own pain and suffering to understand someone else’s. Nothing good ever comes from comparing our suffering.

The Black Lives Matter movement is not asking for a comparison. They are not trying to discount the suffering of others. They are just asking for our support and understanding that right now they need help from the rest of us, especially white people, in order to combat the injustice they encounter on a daily basis.

When you say All Lives Matter, you are trying to show empathy. I get that. But you are doing so by changing the focus. You are trying to include yourself, your own suffering and the suffering of other groups that are important to you. You may be a family member to an officer who died in the line of duty, and you feel you also deserve compassion, which is entirely true. You may be someone who believes there are other injustices equally as important as the way our society treats black people. You may be an immigrant who feels that the attention towards black people is taking the media’s eyes off of you and your family, who struggles every day to put food on the table because your father was deported. You may be someone with a physical disability who feels underrepresented in our country and who finds it difficult to even leave your apartment every day because half the places you need to visit are not handicap accessible. You may even be a police officer who has to leave his or her family every morning, never knowing if you will make it back alive before the day ends.

All of your suffering is justified and all of it should be met with compassion. But when someone else is suffering and crying for help, nothing gets accomplished if our response is “I need help too!”. Rather than saying “my life matters too” we need to instead say, “your life matters to me”. The only way to end the day-to-day injustices in our society and in the world is if, during a person’s time of need, we respond like this:

“I hear your cry for help. I feel your pain. Let me help you and hopefully one day you will be able to help me.” #BlackLivesMatter #YourLifeMatters

