by Paul W. Jackson

Except for a few hateful deer flies, each life matters. But not to everyone.

On obituary pages, it’s statistically uncommon to find people we know. Mostly, they’re strangers. If we recognize a name, we’ll stop, read, care a little, maybe say a prayer of comfort for the people who mattered to the deceased. But people we’ve never known existed before that moment don’t matter to us. Still, each one’s death – and thus each life – matters to someone.

Humans lack the capacity to have concern for every life. Yet it’s true that each life matters.

Except each life doesn’t matter to ideology and ideologues who would force you to buy your ideas in bulk and, by threat of stigmata, to lump certain ethnic groups or professions together for ideological mantras such as all lives matter; or black lives matter; or gay lives matter. The list is long.

Sorry to smash that hateful stinging, angry pest into our necks, but the group doesn’t matter until the individuals in it do. That’s why each life matters and the ideology is a blind fool with only one agenda: to sting you and require your blood.

Ideologues who would have us chant their deceptive creeds and perhaps genuflect to their demands when we rise off our knee tell you they see the big picture, and are thus superior to us. But when the view from lofty perches requires everyone to think alike or else, it clearly prioritizes the group above the individual. Group thinking is prime, fertile soil for bigotry and prejudice, the roots of racism.

Yet here we are, two generations removed from eloquently stated dreams of individual rights, facing a bigoted ideology that loudly harangues that all cops are bad, all blacks or gays or whites are good or bad, when what they really mean is that each life is irrelevant to the overall cause. They’re insisting by their actions that each life does not matter. Only select lives. Because groups don’t have consciences. People do.

Group philosophy shows us its fruit: grieving and rioting for a man killed in a horrific way, but ignoring a man of the same race’s murder because he wore a different, unpopular uniform. Only select people matter to the ideology. and only when their lives and deaths promote the ideology. People who question the ideology don’t matter any more than a deer fly.

Individuals who live outside ideological ivory towers know better. We know that the only way to rightly judge a person is based on the individual’s actions. In other words, we judge individuals based on the “content of their character,” not their skin color or which groups they’ve joined. That implies individualism, not ideology. And right now, the two are incompatible. Maybe they always were.

Saying that all cops are bad or that all white people are racist or that only black lives matter is bigotry and prejudice. Such phrases clearly are exclusionary terms that “marginalize” people. Isn’t that what the ideology claims it seeks to change?

Nothing will change for the good under these conditions. Truth cannot be found by promoting lies and stereotypes any more than killing one deer fly will prevent others from attacking.

But again, here we are, complaining about old wounds and suffering volumes of largely impotent legislation. We’re still swatting these nasty, evil little flies buzzing around our heads, stinging us with paradoxes. They tell us the ideology matters more than the people it enslaves. They tell us we can conquer hate by hating groups of people. Compliance flies into our ears with catch-phrases and public-relations campaigns meant not to free individuals from bigotry and prejudice and racism, but to dogmatize the ideology, which, again, is a blind fool.

So when you catch one of those nasty little flies trying to get into your head, find savory satisfaction in crushing it between your fingers. How?

There’s still time to cultivate nine fruits found in Galatians 5:22-23: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.

Let’s destroy mob-mentality ideology before it destroys each individual. Because even though all lives don’t matter to each of us, each life matters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul Jackson is a former writer for the Allegan County News & Gazette and Penasee Globe and former editor of the Michigan Farm Bureau News.