All Lives Matter

I heard somewhere recently that black lives matter. More recently, I've heard that white lives matter, too. Many believe that the lives of children, including children too young to have experienced their first ray of sunlight, matter. I believe that ALL human lives matter, and I'm not alone in that belief.

We've all heard the phrase "no man is an island." Until recently, I thought that that phrase meant that no one achieves success without help, but since I found out where that phrase came from, I now interpret it differently. The thought comes from John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17, and the full sentence, including clauses linked by semicolons, is this:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

We are all involved in mankind. What we do affects everyone, and what happens to anyone also affects us. The death of any person, no matter whether you ever have or would have met them or not, has an impact on humanity and thus has an impact on you. Every human life should matter to everyone, no matter what our differences are.