Brave comments

A rapper (A$AP Rocky? Never heard of him) - showed some real courage in his statements as posted in an article on Huffpost:

"Why are we exploiting the beef between the urban community and the police force when 60 people got shot on a Friday and Saturday [on July holiday weekend in 2014] in Chicago in black-on-black crime? So one cop shoots a black person... that kind of shit is inevitable. Not to glorify it, but that's nothing new. Let's talk about the black-on-black crime. If you're not gonna talk about the main topic, then don't talk about it all."

Of course this created a great deal of angst and drew the ire of a lot of people, because it is clear that black lives only matter when they are ended by a law enforcement officer or white person.

But let's be honest - if lives matter all lives matter and the problem is bigger than slogans.  Just as with the knee-jerk reactions about confederate flags and gun control - they are ways people can avoid addressing the real problems.  It is so much easier to point fingers at "oppressors" like LEO or another race than it is to look at yourself and say "Damn, we're pretty fucked up".  It is comfortable to see the problem in someone else's backyard, to see it as something they need to fix, than it is to figure out what we can do.

That is why there will not be any real meaningful change form any of this - people will work to curtail the rights of others they blame and the same old will go on.