Another day, another black man shot dead.

Another week, another mass shooting.

Another month, another attack on a police officer.

Another year, another hideous, tedious, drawn-out free-for-all optimistically referred to as a “presidential election.”

With each passing day, it grows more difficult to get out of bed, anticipating the day’s tragic headlines and blood-spattered newspapers.

With each passing week, it grows more difficult to remember the locations of all the shootings, let alone the names of all of the victims.

With each passing month – and particularly in this election year – it grows more apparent that America is tearing itself apart and slinging plenty of mud in the process.

Americans are lashing out at each other as though our neighbors are to blame for our pain, for the wrongs done to us.

As though the guy in apartment B is responsible for the racism that the family in apartment A must endure – rather than being hopelessly, completely clueless about its systemic existence.

As though it is the fault of the man who received the promotion that his female colleague did not – rather than the fault of decades of a subtle system designed to buoy him and suppress her.

As though all those “others” – the Mexicans, the terrorists, the black and the brown and the blue – are to blame for the suffering, the lives lost, the daddies and mommies and babies killed in our streets, in our universities, in our homes and in our sacred spaces.

Pleas for tolerance from both sides, from all sides, fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. Facebook feeds are ugly places. Hideous examples of racism, ignorance, misogyny, bigotry, are reduced to hashtags and so to meaninglessness. Rape, unpunished. Murder, unrecognized. Potential, unreached. Lives, unlived.
It sure as hell looks like Rome is burning. Are we witnesses to the death throes of a once-great nation? Is the grand experiment of democracy, in the end, an utter failure? Is this country truly too diverse – geographically and socially – to thrive?

This may be the last gasp of the United States of America. This may be what it looked like when Rome burned.

But maybe this is what America looked like in the 1960s, when assassinations and race riots rocked the cities and the suburbs alike. Maybe this is what America looked like in the 1860s, when the Civil War threatened to destroy a young country. Maybe this is what America looked like, before it was America. Maybe we have a chance at redemption and reconciliation.

Maybe, but these lessons are not quickly learned and these grievances are not quickly healed. And in the meantime we forget, or refuse to remember – Yankee or Southerner, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, uniforms of grey or red or blue or camo, it doesn’t matter. All blood looks the same on the ground.