Social movements are bizarre things. They sprout up, they simmer down to nothing, they flame brightly and then fade. They have their own little lives.
The funniest and weirdest one of my lifetime has got to be the Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter marches of five years ago.
Fed up with young black men getting routinely murdered by the police, a 21st century Civil Rights group/movement named Black Lives Matter began, with people, black, white, and brown marching in defense of black lives.
As a reaction to this, a conservative group jumped up, calling itself All Lives Matter, as a means of countering the idea that they thought, incorrectly, was the point of Black Lives Mattering, saying no, in fact, other lives matter, too.
But the whole point of Black Lives Matter was to say that All lives, including black ones, matter. Their nemesis was, inadvertently, saying the exact same thing. When they said all lives matter, they, probably accidentally, were saying that black lives do, in fact, matter, which is what the Black Lives Matter people were saying all along.
And I’m not sure either group ever realized the irony.