We're all thinking about the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, trying to figure out what it means or what it should mean or just what's the correct response to it beyond saying murder is a bad thing. Today, I read a number of articles and heard a number of thoughts and two of them really work for me.
One of them is a column by William Saletan. He says there's a war out there but it's not a war of whites versus blacks. It's a war between people who want a race war and those who don't. The minute I read his piece, I thought to myself: Yeah, that's right.
The other speaker of truth (to me) today was a Lyft driver I had this morning. He was a big black guy. If you were a casting director and the producer said, "Find me a big black guy who looks menacing and ghetto and if you saw him walking towards you late at night, even the most liberal person would be a bit worried," you'd try to find a guy who looked like this fellow.
But he was a very nice, affable guy and his car radio was reporting details from Dallas so we got talking about it. He said, "This makes everything worse. Whether you're black, white, whatever, this makes things worse for everybody."
The minute he said that, I thought to myself: Yeah, that's right.