Today was supposed to be the final part of my election series. That was until I woke up to the awful news of what happened in Dallas. It’s senseless. It’s all senseless. Why does this always happen? How did we as a civilized culture get to a point where we solve violence with even more disgusting violence? At what point did ideals give people the right to get violent with another and we were supposed to just accept it?

Well, I don’t accept it. I don’t accept that it’s okay to use excessive force. I don’t accept that in order to fight excessive force you have to answer with more excessive force. I don’t have an issue with the ideals behind the Black Lives movement. There is something wrong in our society that clearly needs to be fixed. However, the problem with ideals are the simple fact that humans are the one that hold them. If this shooting proves anything it’s that people manage to screw up even the most innocent of ideals.

What happened to following such inspiring and influential leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi? These were men that changed not just their own movements but the world around them. These were pacifists that believed that violence never solved a thing. They made real changes in the world through eloquent articulation, not through guns or violence. They fought for their causes in a dignified manner. And there is nothing dignified about this type of behavior at all.

Peaceful protests that clearly aim to address a problem is more effective than ones that turn riotous. That is a simple fact. Think of all of the peaceful protests that we remember today. King’s Selma March is iconic. You will never remember the violent protest  in Baltimore and even this turn of events will likely be forgotten soon. These were bad times. The violence at these events turned them from people fighting a cause to no better than the reason that this group was formed to begin with.

There is a foot patrolman in my neighborhood that you can see playing soccer with the kids in the low-income apartments next to my house, playing with kids of all races. What if this kind man was shot just because he was in uniform? There is another one who will go over to everyone he sees and waves or stops to talk with anyone that wants him to. Why should he die because of some corrupt cop? What makes you any better going after innocent men in blue just because of a prejudice that you may have against them? Does that really make you any better than the cop that shot a kid just because he was born with a certain skin color?

This was not peaceful. This was retaliation. This is what happens when people escalate a cause and make people forget what the actual cause is. No innocent person should die, period. It doesn’t matter what profession you are, your race, your religion. No innocent person should die. No one wins when that happens except for the bad guys. And I am really tired of the bad guys always winning.