You lied, didn't you? Be honest. Be brave for once in your life. Have that internal confessional. You'll feel better for it. I'm not unreasonable. You don't even have to admit it to me. Just admit it to yourself. Take the leap and face the truth that during recent protests by the Black Lives Matter movement when you so earnestly flooded social media with the proclamation that, no, All Lives Matter, you didn't mean it, did you? If you did, things would be very different.
The lives destroyed by recent events in Lebanon don't matter. If they did, you wouldn't have stood idly by as the west exploited the middle east for its own ends, helping to increase rather than eliminate the structural inequalities that are now becoming so tragically clear. Ditto the lives of those in Yemen. If those lives mattered to you, you would be screaming from every rooftop about the UK selling arms to a criminal government in Saudi Arabia.
Animal lives don't matter to you. If they did, you wouldn't pay someone to kill them like this so you can have a bacon sandwich. And while we're on the subject of food, it's striking how little the lives of your own children matter to you. If they did, you might have long since reconsidered your meat obsession, given how it's killing the very planet they are set to inherit from you.
And refugee lives certainly don't matter to you. This one I know beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's out there in plain sight. Social media is full of evidence, just as it was full of all lives mattering a few weeks ago. Allow me to share...
'Send in the navy that's what it's for' says one Facebook user. Until now, I've always thought the Royal Navy aimed a little higher than child refugees in rubber dinghies. That perhaps its mission was a tad more higher level than that, but I stand corrected.
'Send them back' says another Facebook user. 'If we keep them in this country more will come. NHS cannot cope and neither can the councils'. Well, indeed. The NHS would certainly find it difficult without the 28% of doctors who identify as non-British. We're going to need a bigger dinghy.
Over on Twitter, having voted himself out of a job, Donald Trump lapdog, multi-millionaire stockbroker and man-of-the-people Nigel Farage is filling his long summer days with ice cream and low rent citizen journalism, as he films the 'shocking invasion' of desperate migrants at Dover. Britain, he says, is 'a soft touch'. If only there was some kind of european union within which multiple countries could have cooperated, Nigel. Things might have been so different, don't you think?
You won. Get over it.
I could go on, but frankly, I'm tired of reading the hypocrisy, of listening to the lies and hearing the same old xenophobic tropes dressed up as post-truth patriotism to divert attention away from the crimes committed by the mafia-like cartels which currently pretend to be governments.
Have it your way if you must. Keep deceiving yourself. Keep telling yourself and everyone else how you truly believe that All Lives Matter. But until your actions support your words and you show respect for all lives - Lebanese, Afghan, Iraqi, Yemeni - your words and hashtags are meaningless. Until you value all human and non-human life and are prepared to change your habits for the sake of your children, your words and hashtags are meaningless. Until you acknowledge refugees as the special, unique people they are; until you choose compassion over false patriotism; until love conquers hate, your words and hashtags are meaningless.
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