It is a hard day when the realization finally hits that there is no such thing as a black and white situation. Gray areas are very real and they are where most of the situations and people in our lives live. It is much easier to live when we think that there are only two possible choices to make or labels to be assigned: easy or hard game, good or bad professor, healthy or overweight, good cop or bad cop.

First, let me begin by saying that I mourn for the families of those individuals who were shot by police officers, but grouping all police officials as racist meatheads is not only untrue, but not much different than grouping all women as weak, all Asians as bad drivers and all blacks as criminals.

I know many cops or retired cops and they are the most honest, hardworking, caring individuals you could ever have the pleasure to meet. They put on their uniforms every day and go out to try to make the world a safer place to live in. Senselessly killing random cops isn’t getting any message across, but merely making sure less people, such as my brother-in-law, return home to their families.

There are bad people in this world, which is a fact that we live with every day. Some hide behind uniforms, some are men, others women, some black, some white, but none of those mentioned are qualifications that make someone a bad human being.

Sure, in the news we are going to hear about a white cop shooting a black man because for centuries our country has been battling racism, but realize that every day cops go out and pull over drunk drivers or take a man into custody before he can lay another hand on his wife and child. These things are happening every single day and they never make the news, but that is merely a cop's job. This is why I believe it is easy to look at an organization and say they are malicious and immoral; but in all honesty, it’s not the world we live in. Cops can’t be our next scapegoats, the next people we point to and say, “there, that’s our problem.”

This week has seen two major, tragic deaths at the hands of police in the media. As I am not fully educated about them, my purpose in this article is not to discuss them specifically. Because the reality is that many more men and women have been killed, this year alone, by cops. But I cannot stress this enough—the vast majority of these deaths occurred at the hands of good police officers.

Stop blaming society for problems; you are society! Don’t wait for all hell to break loose to start fixing an already existing problem. It is time now more than ever to stand together. We are not black vs. white and we are not cop vs. civilian. The sooner the world realizes, this the sooner we can grow as a nation.