Hi and welcome to Calm Cash. A lot has happened since last week. While our country continues to be plagued by the coronavirus pandemic, an old, insidious plague that has existed since the founding of our country has taken center stage this past week. Of course I’m talking about racial inequality and all the fear, hate, violence, death and unfortunately silence and inactivity that go along with it. The wounds re-open frequently and never heal mainly because most of us do nothing. Maybe out of our own fear about saying the wrong thing. So instead of being silent…let’s talk. First, let’s talk about the landscape. The George Floyd video was heartbreaking and I was unable to watch it all. It was so affecting because of the length, dialogue and horror of the video. At the memorials, protests and rallies you see the names of past victims too but we might be missing the full context of the problem when it comes to profiling and police brutality. In 2019, 1004 citizens were fatally shot by the police.  The rate of fatal shootings in Black Americans was much higher than any other ethnicity. There were 996 people shot in 2018 and so far 429 civilians have been killed by police in 2020. For every George Floyd or Michael Brown in Ferguson there are 100s of other people, Black men and women, who have died at the hands of the police whose names we will never know or hear. This has to stop. Next, I want to speak very bluntly about something that bothers me and has to change for us to advance the dialogue. If someone says “Black Lives Matter” and the word you hear out of someone’s mouth in response is “Well”…and then something that follows like “of course ALL lives matter”. We need to call that person out and help them understand how that sounds to a Black person. At best it is tone deaf and at worse it is highly offensive. It discounts and diminishes the focus on the violence and discrimination black individuals face every day. I’ve heard a bunch of analogies to help explain this but the one that constantly resonates to me is one I heard a few years ago when a Black man was explaining Black Lives Matter to a group. He said: I have a son and a daughter and if someone says to me “do you love your daughter?” and my response is “I love all my kids” then my daughter I’m pretty sure would think “you don’t love me. If you do, why wouldn’t you just say it.” Everyone already knows All lives matter, we are past it and it doesn’t need to be said. Speaking of bubbles, let’s talk about how we get out of the ones we are in when it comes to information and education on issues that matter. The term used is “filter bubble” and this is the phenomenon of being isolated from information that differs from your preferred viewpoints. You would think in 2020 that sharing information and educating yourself on the facts would be easier than any time in history. But ironically it isn’t because of technology…mostly social media. It is easy to get locked into these thought and idea filter bubbles because we curate our friends and connections online, can easily mute or block the people and opinions we don’t want to see and then AI and machine learning serve up content, ads and information that reinforce our context from the algorithms running Google, Facebook, Twitter and news sources. This has been happening for years and we have learned this behavior. There is a news app called Read Across the Aisle whose goal is to burst your filter bubble. Another good solution is AllSides. This is a news aggregator app that will take a topic and bring together 3 well-written articles – one each from the left, center and right sources – to give broader coverage to a story. It is a good way to expand your news and information. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/calmcash/message