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MLK's daughter shared a powerful message about how people react to these two photos

MLK's daughter shared a powerful message about how people react to these two photos

When Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem at the beginning of NFL games, many Americans railed against him. They called him un-American. They called him disrespectful. They failed to see his peaceful protest against racial injustice and police brutality as the act of a patriot yearning to improve his country, choosing to focus on their own discomfort with his actions instead.

This Monday, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the back and neck of a black man, George Floyd, who had just been taken into police custody. According to CBS News, he was a forgery suspect, and as the officer held him to the ground, video taken by bystanders shows Floyd repeatedly crying out that he couldn't breathe.

"My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts ..." he can be heard saying in the video. "(I need) water or something. Please. Please. I can't breathe, officer. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe."


Floyd stopped moving. The bystanders continually asked the officer why he kept kneeling on the man's neck and chest. At one point, he knelt with his hands in his pockets while Floyd lay beneath his legs. It's incredibly disturbing to watch, considering that Floyd was pronounced dead at the hospital the same evening.

People are understandably outraged. The FBI is now investigating the incident and the four officers involved have been fired. Hopefully, justice will prevail—though even if it does, it won't bring back this man's life.

But this is not a lone case. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. posted a striking photo combo of the officer kneeling on Floyd on one side and Kaepernick kneeling on the sidelines, writing on Twitter:

"If you're unbothered or mildly bothered by the 1st knee, but outraged by the 2nd, then, in my father's words, you're 'more devoted to order than to justice.' And more passionate about an anthem that supposedly symbolizes freedom than you are about a Black man's freedom to live."

The reason for the kneeling on the right is the same kneeling on the left. It's not just a matter of police simply killing black people—it's the dehumanization and devaluing of black lives in our justice system overall. It's the straight line one can draw from a white woman wielding her racist power to call the police—telling them "an African-American man is threatening my life" when a birdwatcher simply asked her to put a leash on her dog per the rules—to the death of an unarmed black man in the hands of law enforcement.

It's the history of vigilante "justice" that makes white men think they have the right to stop a jogger in the middle of the street and question him at gunpoint and then kill him when he tries to defend himself.

It's the inability of a black man to calmly inform an officer that he has a legal, concealed carry weapon without getting shot in his car in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter.

It's the inability of a black man to exercise his second amendment right and defend his loved ones and property without having his girlfriend shot eight times and killed in her own bed.

It's story after story of automatic suspicion of wrongdoing, presumption of criminality and assumption of guilt of a black person in a police encounter. It's also the lack of accountability and killing with impunity for law enforcement officers that happens far too often.

This is why distrust of the police exists. This is why kneeling protests exist. This is why Black Lives Matter exists.

A police officer can sit with his hands in his pockets while a black man begs for breath beneath his knee while no one with any power in the situation does anything to stop it. This is why Kap knelt. This is why, no matter what you feel about the anthem, he wasn't wrong to do so.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Satisfied, you walk back to your car feeling proud of yourself for telling that liar off and even more satisfied as you walk the additional 100 steps to get to the store from your lame parking spot all the way at the back of the lot. But did you ever stop and wonder if you told off the wrong person?

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There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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8 nontraditional empathy cards that are unlike any you've ever seen. They're perfect!

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True compassion.

When someone you know gets seriously ill, it's not always easy to come up with the right words to say or to find the right card to give.

Emily McDowell — a former ad agency creative director and the woman behind the Los Angeles-based greeting card and textile company Emily McDowell Studio — knew all too well what it was like to be on the receiving end of uncomfortable sentiments.

At the age of 24, she was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin's lymphoma. She went into remission after nine months of chemo and has remained cancer-free since, but she received her fair share of misplaced, but well-meaning, wishes before that.

On her webpage introducing the awesome cards you're about to see, she shared,

"The most difficult part of my illness wasn't losing my hair, or being erroneously called 'sir' by Starbucks baristas, or sickness from chemo. It was the loneliness and isolation I felt when many of my close friends and family members disappeared because they didn't know what to say or said the absolute wrong thing without realizing it."

Her experience inspired Empathy Cards — not quite "get well soon" and not quite "sympathy," they were created so "the recipients of these cards [can] feel seen, understood, and loved."

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After persevering through numerous medical conditions and surgeries in her own life, Elman realized a few years ago that body positivity wasn't just about size or weight. Things like scars, birthmarks, and anything else that makes us feel different of self-conscious have to be a part of the conversation, and she tries to make the movement accessible to everyone.

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