The events in Dallas Thursday night in which 12 police officers were shot - five fatally - are tragic and heartbreaking. As despicable as they are, however, they are not surprising. The dam has burst, and it shouldn't surprise anybody that an angry man decided to retaliate in kind.
Remarkably, protests against police brutality across the country have been peaceful. The Dallas protest was peaceful, until shots rang out.
It was only a matter of time before someone with a gun sought retribution. Sometimes, when people feel powerless, they resort to terrorist means.
This country needs a complete and immediate overhaul of its police culture and official police procedures. The overreach of police officers, the excessive and indefensible use of deadly force, and the disregard for the lives of black men and women are unconscionable.
Ironically, as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings pointed out during a news conference, Dallas has been on the forefront of these changes. And its eloquent black police chief, David Brown, is emerging as an important voice of reason. But as the killings there demonstrate, time is running out for other cities to follow suit.
This country also needs to do some serious collective soul searching about what transpired this week in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, and what has been happening in cities and small towns across the United States for years, as black men, women and children know all too well. I can only imagine the thousands of police shootings that were not caught on video in the days before we all had iPhones - those that were never witnessed.
Where are we, as a country. when a woman who has just watched in horror as the police kill her boyfriend, feels compelled to live stream the aftermath?
Where are we when Diamond Reynolds, whose four-year-old daughter sits in the back seat of the car in which Philando Castile has been fatally shot, knows that she must take justice into her own hands to provide proof of a police officer's crime?
We are in a profoundly dark place. A profoundly sad place. And a terribly dangerous place, where neither citizens nor police officers are safe.
Americans cannot turn their backs on these crimes another day. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you are the oppressor," in the words of Desmond Tutu.
The shootings of Alton Sterling and Phillando Castillo, captured in part on video, are so heinous that no American of any race has the right to look away, no matter how hard it is to watch. Especially because it so hard to watch.
We all must bear witness.
And we must support our police officers, the majority of whom are good men and women who put their lives on the line every day. But that's not going to be easy for the black men and women of this country who rightly feel under siege. It's going to be downright impossible if justice is not served in the Sterling and Castile cases.
Americans cannot hear, yet again, that another police officer has escaped responsibility and punishment for the shooting death of another black citizen. I don't think this country can bear it if those officers are exonerated.
No matter what the probes uncover to explain how the police interpreted the situations in which they found themselves, it is clear, and documented, that they did not have to kill those men.
How many more traffic stops are going to turn into the murders of black men and women? We wondered how many people had to die in mass shootings before politicians did anything, and we got our pathetic answer after Orlando. How many more people have to die at the hands of police before government officials do something real and significant to change policing? I fear the answer.
We talk a lot about cultures in this country - rape culture, gun culture, the culture of police brutality, the cultures of oppression. There's a common thread here: our culture is bathed in violence and a disregard for human life. As states work to pass idiotic bathroom bills and unconstitutional anti-abortion laws, people - living, breathing people - are dying at the hands of police, at the hands of terrorists, at the hands of disturbed young men. Police officers are dying at the hands of people who can't take it anymore.
It feels as if we've returned to the days of the Wild West, when a sheriff's badge didn't always signify a good man, and guns ruled the land. When life was expendable.
What we so desperately need is a culture of human dignity, of human worth, of restraint and respect. What we need is a tectonic cultural shift, and we need it fast.