Black guy riding around flooded Louisiana has a pretty great set of questions:

“Where are the Black Lives Matter and Black Panthers? I ain’t seen one Black Panther boat or one Black Lives Matter boat. All I see is our own people in the city, the Wildlife and Fisheries, and the police going in and rescuing people.”

And:

“All the drama that was going on with the Alton Sterling killing, they came out with guns ready to go to war. But here we go, all these people flooded out and truly in need of help and we can’t find not one of them.”

Nothing against him, but I wouldn’t contribute to this guy’s GoFundMe campaign. Give instead to a relief fund you can count on. Still, the points he makes are dead on target. Where is Black Lives Matter? Not in Baton Rouge this week, that’s for sure. I guess black lives only really matter to those activists when they’ve been taken by cops, not when they’ve been saved by cops. Which is happening every single day down here. White people and black people, including Baton Rouge police officers (half of whom lost their homes), working together to save white people and black people and all kinds of people.

This doesn’t make all the problems of police brutality and black violence go away. But it does put them in perspective.

Hey all you liberal churches up North with your Black Lives Matter banners out front — where you at? Get down here and help. All Lives Matter. The flood waters are not prejudiced. They hate everybody.

This disaster has been clarifying in many ways. Good thing BLM has $100 million in pledges from rich liberal foundations, I guess, because after this experience, they’re not going to get much of a hearing down here.

But look, I have a challenge to white people who take satisfaction in this: What are you doing to help black lives, white lives, Asian lives, Latino lives, and all lives wrecked by this flood? I talked to a conservative I know yesterday, here in Louisiana, someone who is full of strong political opinions, and I came away discouraged. This person has resources and time to help, but won’t do a damn thing for anybody, except sit in front of Fox News and the local news coverage and offer nothing — not a drink of water, not a bed to sleep in, not a hot meal to the homeless refugees — but opinions.

UPDATE: Let me share something with you liberal readers who have your noses out of joint in the same way pro-Trump conservative readers did when I bashed Trump on Sunday with respect to the floods. I don’t really expect Black Lives Matter to show up to help black flood victims any more than I expect Donald Trump to turn his eyes away from his full-length mirror to look at the people here in Louisiana suffering. My point is that the magnitude of this tragedy, and its intensity, and the way people are responding (or failing to respond) to it, casts a harsh light on the things that have dominated our political discourse in the last year.

You know what it would take to get Black Lives Matter down to Baton Rouge now? If a BRPD officer shot one of the black looters they’ve arrested looting black homes. 

UPDATE.2: Commenter JonahR makes a great point:

Commenter John wrote: “Black Lives Matter has a singular focus for its efforts: the disproportionate regularity with which black people die in police custody, as compared to suspects of any other race.”

That’s not true! Just look at BLM’s own website and their own words:

They are “committed to…doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege.”

They are “committed to dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ that require them to mother in private even as they participate in justice work.”

They are committed to “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking” and “fostering a queer-affirming network.”

They are “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

Most damningly, they say their commitment to destroying the nuclear family will happen “by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

So where are they? Where’s that commitment to collective care in action? Rednecks with fanboats have now done more for black lives in and around Baton Rouge than BLM could ever accomplish with years of street theater.

What I don’t understand is why people lie on behalf of Black Lives Matter when the group is blunt and unambiguous about its larger revolutionary goals.