ArcaMax

I have never been entirely comfortable with the name that the Black Lives Matter movement chose for itself.

I get their point. The group's founders didn't mean to imply that other people's lives don't matter. Their hashtag #BlackLivesMatter aims to protest how black lives didn't seem to matter in a growing list of scandalous police killings.

But right-wingers easily pushed back, dismissing the movement with the retort, "All lives matter."

I used the term "right-wingers," not conservatives, because true conservatives deplore abuses of state power against individuals. It is the grumpy right-wingers who want those black protesters and their uppity liberal allies to shut up and go away.

To them, "All lives matter" isn't a slogan or a movement. It is a dismissal. It is an attempt to end dialogue before it has begun.

But the tragic events of recent days should sober all of us Americans up to the need to show that all lives really matter and take action to show it.

The first casualty of the week was Alton Sterling, who police in Baton Rouge busted early Tuesday for selling bootleg CDs. A viral cell phone video shows police forcing him to the ground and restraining him. An officer further away from the camera shouts that the restrained man has a gun. The closer officer draws his weapon and shoots the man on the ground at close range.

Shocking. We might have had better quality video if both officers' cameras had not fallen off in the scuffle, according to police. What a sorry coincidence.

The following evening, another black man Philando Castile, 32, was fatally shot by the St. Anthony Police Department in Minnesota, apparently during a traffic stop.

His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, turned on the one tool she had available, her cell phone. Talking to the officer and repeatedly addressing him as "sir," she feeds video and her agitated narration to her Facebook page. As her boyfriend bleeds to death in the driver's seat and her 4-year-old daughter cries in the back seat, we can't see the officer's face but we can see his gun, still aimed at Reynolds as she speaks.

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