People are easily influenced, myself included. If we weren’t, jobs like educators, politicians, and even storytellers wouldn’t exist. We’re here to empathize, to listen, and to take in the world and make sense of it all. A good number of my own viewers, for some weird reason, care enough about my own personal opinion that they actually read this blog so I want to make one thing crystal clear right now.

Black lives matter.

Given the type of stories I write, I can’t imagine a dedicated reader of mine will be shocked that I take this stance, but that doesn’t change the fact that it need be said. We can easily be influenced by not just the words of people, especially the people we look up to, but also their silence. As someone who has even one person listening to me, it’s important for me as a human being to declare that human rights are important, that the skewed level of police brutality black people in not just the USA but my own country of Canada face is unjust. On my own time and dollar I went to a protest in Toronto and donated to my local charities supporting black causes.

As storytellers our job is to narrate the state of humanity and just sort of go, “So here are some characters demonstrating the train of thought that I and my friends currently have.” We can either choose to acknowledge this, or not. Everyone, even the antagonists, in my stories, have been created from thoughts I had in my head. Thoughts of how human beings think and operate in given situations. At the end of the day I acknowledge this bias and intent, and want to use it for good. Being More Social had morals. The Good, the Bad and the Molly had such blatant morals I stuck ’em into the epilogue. Well, same here. Black rights are human rights, as if that’s not an obvious point to make. We know it, but as a society we just don’t feel it. If we did, we wouldn’t have just seen major cities in all 50 states as well as numerous other countries worldwide show their support in solidarity for those that have faced unjust brutality at the hands of authoritarians who think the law doesn’t apply to them and that they can apply their racist self-endowed sword of justice wherever they damn well please.

If you haven’t, after you finish reading this blog, I ask you to please listen to Black voices right now. I’m white, and there’s a good chance you’ve been hearing a lot more white voices talk about recent events than black ones. Please, if you do one thing today, listen to black voices. My voice isn’t the one that matters on this topic, but I’m going to use it to highlight the voices that we all should be listening to here. I’ll talk to you all next week.