"Black Lives Matter!"

"War on Cops!"

Two slogans, seemingly mutually exclusive. One side of a coin, and the flip side.

"Black Lives Matter" is a slogan born after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman a couple years ago in Florida. After a number of killings of young black men and women since, the slogan has grown in the public consciousness.

One of the most interesting things about it is the angry and fearful and dismissive reaction of it by so many prominent white people.

Television's Bill O’Reilly called supporters of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan a "hate group that wants police dead."  That label was also thrown about by such bright lights as our own sheriff, David Clarke, and Elizabeth Hasselbeck. Republican presidential candidates have also been critical, including Gov. Scott Walker.

In an editorial on the website Hot Air, Walker diagnosed "a disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job" and blamed "a rise in anti-police rhetoric" "under President Barack Obama."

"This kind of attitude has created a culture in which we all too often see demonstrations and chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon’," Walker wrote. "This inflammatory and disgusting rhetoric has real consequences for the safety of officers who put their lives on the line for us and hampers their ability to serve the communities that need their help."

The "War on Cops" slogan has come from many of the same people who dismiss the "Black Lives Matter" tag. The blame for this one falls on everyone from Hillary Clinton to Obama to the "Black Lives Matter" supporters. There are other people who claim that this war has caused police to be more fearful and to hesitate to respond to disturbances for fear they will get shot.

That slogan is less specific but it has been endorsed and thrown about by virtually every Republican you ever hear from.

All of this is a bunch of short-sighted crap that is totally out of touch with realities – the reality of being a cop and the reality of being a young black man.

Let’s deal with that "War on Police" thing first.

There is no real war on police. What there is, really, is a war zone in many of our urban communities. What happens, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is that police officers, all sworn to protect and serve, put themselves in that war zone on a daily basis.

Some people say the police are afraid. In reality what they are is brave. I can’t imagine having the courage to patrol some of these mean streets or to answer some of these disturbing domestic violence cases.

There is no "War on Police." It’s just that police find themselves in the middle of a war.

As for "Black Lives Matter," it is clearly not a question of whether all lives matter, as some people shout. Of course all lives matter.

But we have a history of black lives mattering less than white lives. For almost a century after the three-fifths compromise, black lives didn’t matter as much as a white life.

And today, with all the gang violence and the neighborhood violence and the occasional police violence, there serious questions about the life of black man.

It’s those black victims and others who fear becoming victims who feel pain and their slogan is designed to express the traumatic reality of their existence.

Changing "Black Lives Matter" to "All Lives Matter" is just a suggestion that we water down the real issue so that white people can all feel good about the slogan.

The chant is important, both historically and in the present day. Certainly "All Lives Matter"  is obvious, but the fact is that obviousness is something that still remains an elusive goal.

Our history is full of more than three centuries of valuing white lives more than black lives. We used to sell black slaves as property. At one point we even had legislation that, in effect, placed the value of a black man at three-fifths of that of a white man. And we are a country that still segregates and discriminates, and imprisons an out of proportion number of black men.

Without slogans and shouting and attention grabbing action we would probably never have gotten a voting rights act or civil rights legislation. It was the cry of those pained who brought about change.

"Black Lives Matter" is, without doubt, a cry from the pained.