Black Lives Matter had its moment in the spotlight. It mattered, it moved people, and it shaped a chapter of public conversation. But with recent events and the way attention shifts, it’s not always treated as the central issue it once was. And in that vacuum, I’ve been noticing another kind of “BLM” taking center stage—one that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with ego: “Be Like Me.”
This “Be Like Me” mindset shows up when people—often loudest on the conservative side right now—push the idea that others should look like them, think like them, vote like them, worship like them, and live like them. It’s not always said that cleanly, but you can feel it in the way conversations are framed. If you don’t match their template, you’re treated like a problem that needs fixing, not a person worth understanding.
History is full of this pattern. People have always tried to pull others into their point of view. Sometimes it starts as persuasion—"convert to my religion," "adopt my values," "see the world my way." When persuasion fails, it can turn darker: forcing people out, “cleansing,” erasing cultures, and rewriting what counts as acceptable. And the scary part is how often it’s justified as moral. People convince themselves they have the right to shape the world because of skin color, religion, nationality, upbringing, or some inherited idea of superiority.
But there’s a big piece we forget when we get too sure of ourselves: nature plays its course. Life has its own rhythm, and there may be a higher power—or at least forces—bigger than our understanding. Our time here is limited. And the legacy we obsess over? For most of us, it’s fragile. In the end, it might just be a name that fades. The real win isn’t being celebrated. The real win is living a fuller life and leaving the world a little better than we found it—even if nobody builds a memorial for it.
“Be Like Me” also shows its ugliest side when it scales up into violence. When nations or groups decide their way is the only way, wars follow, and innocent people pay the price—whether that’s in Europe, Africa, or Asia. The language changes depending on the place, but the outcome is the same: suffering gets normalized, and power gets treated like proof of righteousness.
There’s also another contradiction that keeps repeating: you can hate a country, a religion, or a culture—and still depend on it. You might look down on them publicly while quietly relying on them for technology, minerals, labor, oil, trade, or strategic advantage. At that point, ego has to step aside if you actually want to move forward. Reality doesn’t care about your pride. The world runs on interdependence, whether we admit it or not.
That’s one reason empires rise and fall the way they do. Empires are often built on commerce and economics—on systems, supply chains, control of resources, and money. But they tend to collapse under ego: the belief that dominance is destiny, that the current order will last forever, that power can’t be challenged. History keeps reminding us that nothing lasts forever, especially when arrogance becomes policy.
On paper, “Be Like Me” can sound clean. It can even feel righteous for a moment—like you’ve earned the right to impose your vision on others. But it doesn’t last. It never lasts. And when religion is pulled into it, the damage goes deeper. Every major religious book talks about forgiveness, understanding, and humility. When people weaponize religion to reach personal or political goals, they don’t just hurt others—they do a disservice to the faith itself. They create falsehoods around it, and in the long run, they poison what they claim to defend.
So instead of “Be Like Me,” I’m trying to choose a different lifelong quest: to understand, and to be understood. Those might be two of the hardest things in the world. But they’re the only things that don’t require domination. They’re the only things that don’t demand uniformity. And if there’s any “movement” worth getting behind now, it’s that—more understanding, more being understood, and a world that gets better because we finally stop trying to turn everyone into a copy of ourselves.
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