don't. shoot. him.

In response to the shooter Dylann Roof--a white supremacist who murdered nine black people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston--being taken alive, a friend of mine posted on Facebook, "Great... now shoot him." Comments that followed included the usual notions about coming up with something better because shooting it too good for him. Because that is what a wounded nation needs--more violence and more death.

If anyone deserves to die, it is the likes of this man. But, that is a very big if. You know what we lose if this man dies, if we torture him to somehow pretend that that cures any ill or repairs any damage done? I mean, aside from a piece of the soul of who we should probably try to be instead of being the fucked up, mostly indifferent people we are. We lose any hope of understanding.

Why would we want to understand this man, you might ask. Or some question close to it. Because the racism at the heart of this man's murderous rage is the same racism that is at the heart of too many scenes of men in authority--white men and, unfortunately, men of color--taking the lives of men of color because it is all too easy to assume the worst and shoot first rather than risk... well, knowing that you are an overreactive, triggerhappy pawn of a system that needs us to struggle constantly against one another rather than ever fight against the system itself or the powers and forces and people at the top that keep this treadmill going.

The recent incidents in McKinney, Texas come to mind. Some deep-seeded expectation that we have that when a police officer tells you to do something, you do it, no questions asked. It's not even a matter of race, so much as it some cult of authority in which we have ceded away far too much of our freedom for an illusion of security. Just this week, outside of Cincinnati, white officers were recorded using pepper spray and one put his arm around a girl's throat in the process of removing a black family from a swimming pool over a boy not wearing the "proper swimming trunks."

And, that seems like a tangent, an insignificant matter when I should be listing off the dead people of color who died because it is okay for the police to use deadly force and darker skin makes for more of a hair trigger. It's easier to suspect people of color of wrongdoing because we've spent centuries now just in this country putting white over every other color. Of course a black boy would seem a little more dangerous because he's an outsider and outsiders can't be understood, can't be reasoned with, must be put down. It would just be sad if we didn't constantly defend such a system and such a nation and such authorities. Instead it's far beyond sad, far beyond tragic; it's disgusting and its despicable and its criminal and we need to stop asking why and start demanding change. Not just people of color. All of us. Stop defending the system just because you happen to be on top of it. Stop assuming that any system works if it results in death after death after death.

And, do not demand more death as a response when you bother to take the right side for a change. We do not need to take the life of a guilty white man to prove some sort of fucked up equality. We need to stop taking the lives of men of color, stop taking the lives of, well, anyone, and take a long, hard look at the world we've made for ourselves, at the people it creates. Dylann Roof is an anomaly, but he is not so far gone from the police officer who throws a teenage girl to the ground because she didn't follow orders to vacate a neighborhood she should have every right to be in, he is not so far from the neighborhood watch coordinator who saw a boy in a hoodie and assumed he was up to no good.

We click like and we share news stories and think that's enough... it's not enough.

But neither is an eye for an eye. More blood just perpetuates the idea that taking a life is ever something worth doing. If your reasons are good enough for murder, it's a nice ol' slippery slope to his reasons being good enough, anyone's reasons being good enough.

Lethal force is not somehow magically good because it is ours. Because we're the good guys. We're not the good guys. Nor are we the bad guys. But we seem to have a knack for doing bad things. And we need to stop.