The world is full of the word ‘peace’

Written out in battered bullet shells

Making an empty promise of change

Or progress

Because we’re in a rut

And instead of getting out, we made ourselves at home

Decorating the walls with 'in memory of..'

'How they could’ve been..'

Instead of 'who they should be'

We’ve stacked our standards

Doubled

Tripled

And made them shelves to hold the morals we’ve chosen to set aside.

We are fighting a war with ourselves and nobody is winning. We are justifying violence in the retaliation of violence in a fight for equality, but we’re fighting fire with fire and everyone’s getting burnt. The justification of brutality against each other is unacceptable; the death of an innocent person – black, white, law enforcement, protestor, and the list goes on – isn’t something to be taken lightheartedly. The one common perception we all share is that we are the good guy, no matter where we stand or what we’ve done. As a nation we’ve stopped standing as a whole and gone our separate ways, setting up barricades, calling each other names. Lives aren’t being lost, they’re being taken from innocent people daily. We live in a world where we’ve been made to fear the people who are designated to protect us and a world where some feel the only way to protect themselves is to take the lives of law enforcement themselves. My heart breaks for every victim and their families who’ve experienced loss at the expense of the pure hatred people have for entire races, religions, cultures, and communities as a whole. Every day another hate crime happens against another race or religion, with justifications like “he had it coming” or “a life for a life.” If we begin to believe “eye for eye,” we will eventually all go blind. This isn’t a game of chess, I can’t take your queen for my knight, this isn’t a game that we can clean up and stack on the top shelf when our mother calls us for dinner. Black lives matter, police lives matter, all lives matter – stop justifying violence in response to violence.

This article comes in light of the shootings of Alton Sterling and Dallas police force, along with all lives lost in response to people's own cruelty and brutality. They’ve pushed populations. We must accept that there is no party that is completely right in these instances, we can’t say that all cops in America are murderers nor can we claim that all victims are innocent. We are one community trying to divide itself against one another. Promote peace.