Here is one of the best, heartfelt and poignant statements that I've read on the immense amount of tragedy that we've encountered this week. This piece by Greg Dworkin titled, Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: White America must see what it does not want to see is also helpful. We as Texans and Americans are very saddened and heartbroken for all of the suffering that families are enduring in Dallas, Texas, Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana even as our memories of Orlando are fresh.
What can you do? Consider signing this petition to end the gag order on studying gun violence which you can read about here.
Thanks to Kenneth Bernstein for sharing.
Angela
A Week From Hell
This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.
After
two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by
police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon
Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly
ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people.
The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black
Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at
white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white
officers.”
We
seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way
out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction,
without resolutions that will satisfy.
There
is so much loss and pain. There are so many families whose hearts hurt
for a loved one needlessly taken, never to be embraced again.
There is so much disintegrating trust, so much animosity stirring.
So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that someone is somehow targeting them.
Friday
morning, after the Dallas shootings, my college student daughter
entered my room before heading out to her summer job. She hugged me and
said: “Dad, I’m scared. Are you scared?” We talked about what had
happened in the preceding days, and I tried to allay her fears and
soothe her anxiety.
How does a father answer such a question? I’m still not sure I got it precisely right.
Truth
is, I am afraid. Not so much for my own safety, which is what my
daughter was fretting about, but more for the country I love.
This is not a level of stress and strain that a civil society can long endure.
I feel numb, and anguished and heartbroken, and I fear that I am far from alone.
And
yet, I also fear that time is a requirement for remedy. We didn’t
arrive at this place overnight and we won’t move on from it overnight.
Centuries
of American policy, culture and tribalism are simply being revealed as
the frothy tide of hagiographic history recedes.
Our
American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of
concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence.
Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too
often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing.
Relationships between communities and cops became strained. A small
number of criminals poisoned police beliefs about whole communities, and
a small number of dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs
about entire police forces. And then, too often the unimaginable
happened and someone ended up dead at the hands of the police.
Since
people have camera phones, we are actually seeing these deaths, live
and in living color. Now a terrorist with a racist worldview has taken
it upon himself to co-opt a cause and mow down innocent officers.
This
is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations
are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and
righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to
use each dead body as a societal wedge?
Will
the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as
selective, discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives
are taken, be heard above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus
for a cumulative argument?
Will
the people who see both the protests over police killings and the
killings of police officers as fundamentally about the value of life
rise above those who see political opportunity in this arms race of
atrocities?
These are very serious questions — soul-of-a-nation questions — that we dare not ignore.
We must see all unwarranted violence for what it is: A corrosion of culture.
I
know well that when people speak of love and empathy and honor in the
face of violence, it can feel like meeting hard power with soft, like
there is inherent weakness in an approach that leans so heavily on
things so ephemeral and even clichéd.
But that is simply an illusion fostered by those of little faith.
Anger and vengeance and violence are exceedingly easy to access and almost effortlessly unleashed.
The
higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral
justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong.
This requires an almost religious faith in fate, and that can be hard for some to accept, but accept it we must.
The
moment any person comes to accept as justifiable an act of violence
upon another — whether physical, spiritual or otherwise — that person
has already lost the moral battle, even if he is currently winning the
somatic one.
When
we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate,
rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way
forward. But we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple
thing: Seeing every person as fully human, deserving every day to make
it home to the people he loves.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
