America's neighborhoods are crying.
As the tears fall, our confusion rises.
In the aftermath of two back-to-back, unnecessary police shootings of men whose crimes in Louisiana and Minnesota appeared only to have been their color, a peaceful protest in Dallas erupted into chaos.
The chaos was not the product of the protest. Nor was it a product of overaggressive Dallas police officers. It was pent up rage of an anguished veteran who took sniper shots at police from the elevated floor of a parking garage.
Twelve officers were hit, along with two civilians. Five officers have died. After hours of barricaded negotiations, police killed the lone shooter with a robot-delivered bomb.
Micah Johnson, the sniper, had served as a private in the Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015. The 25-year-old was a carpentry and masonry specialist, assigned to the 420th Engineer Brigade. He served in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014.
Before the shoots rang out, the Dallas protesters and the Dallas police were not at odds.
The protest had been peaceful and participants were winding down to go home. The police wore shirt-sleeves - not riot gear. They carried no tear gas, wore no helmets, drove no street tanks.
Yet the unhealed hate of decades bled out.
Dallas police chief David O. Brown said Friday that the sniper, during the parking garage standoff, told negotiators he "was upset about Black Lives Matter. "He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers."
As a society - especially in this time of hateful political speech, Wild West open-carry gun rules and anger that seemingly knows no bounds - we've ripped the scab from a wound festering with centuries-old racial resentments.
As a country, as states, as cities and towns and neighborhoods, we absolutely must stop the hateful language, the hateful texts and tweets and Facebook postings that has been unleashed in recent years. We also must be willing to acknowledge the poor police training, poor social training, inadequate veteran and mental health care, absurdly lax gun safety laws, exploitative entertainment and shallow news coverage - all things that serve to foster our divisive discontent.
We must find a way to build cohesive communities again.
We must find a way to open our hearts - not close and harden them with fear and hate.