The police in Dallas, along with the protesters who held a Black Lives Matter rally there Thursday night, were showing the nation the way forward, out of this agonizing season of racial turmoil, when the gunfire began.
The protesters were airing their outrage. The police were listening. Most important, the sides were talking to each other, as the photos posted to social media from the event showed. Multiplied a millions times over, those protests, and those interactions, are what America needs to heal its racial divisions.
No wonder an extremist chose to target that dialogue. When you want war, as alleged gunman Micah Xavier Johnson apparently did, nothing poses more of a threat than the peacemakers. Johnson, 25, opened fire and killed five officers near the end of the march, according to police.
"He wanted to kill white people, especially white officers," said the Dallas police chief after Johnson was killed in a subsequent standoff with police. Contrary to early reports, Johnson, an Army veteran, apparently acted alone. The shootings also left seven wounded.
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Many questions will need to be answered in coming days as the investigation unfolds. How did Johnson acquire the weapon of war apparently used in the shooting? Were any warning signs missed? Those questions are important, but secondary.
The overriding goal of all Americans should be to prevent Johnson from getting his wish, which seems to have been an eye-for-eye cycle of vengeance that's a recipe for endless violence. Honoring the dead officers means continuing the dialogue that they and their city willingly embraced, while rejecting the killer's desire for bloodshed.
Dialogue is often hard, especially when talking about something as fraught as race and bias. Retreating to corners — by vilifying protesters, or police — is easy. The unfortunate tweet from the Dallas police, prematurely naming a black man who had no involvement as a "suspect," with all the subtlety of a wanted poster, shows how quickly nerves can fray under the stress of violence. Worse, the lieutenant governor of Texas lashed out at Black Lives Matter, as if the protesters were somehow to blame for a murderer who opened fire on them, too. That's just the kind of divisive reaction extremists hope for.
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It is possible to support both the police and the protesters, just as both are supporting each other in Dallas today. As a nation, we really have no other choice. In Dallas and across the United States, the protests — and the conversation —