When will enough be enough? How many lives have to become statistics before we stop shooting at each other? In the past two weeks alone, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, five Dallas police officers, and two sheriffs at a Michigan courthouse have all become national headlines as their lives were senselessly taken. And if I’m being honest, I’m appalled by what our world is turning into.

I’m not sure when this epidemic of racism began in our country. It seems as though it’s been ingrained in our society from the start, always been a war of The White Man versus someone else, someone different. We’ve never been content with the idea of sameness. Instead, we build barriers with each and every difference we find. Barriers that separate “us” from “them.”

This deep-rooted problem has gotten so bad that we have movements just to tell us that Black Lives Matter, when we should already know that. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have people saying that Blue Lives Matter (in reference to police officers). Here’s a crazy idea: What if we acknowledged that all of our lives are precious and that we all matter? Not just whites or people of color, or cops. What if we acknowledged that we are all one in the same? We are all someone’s son, daughter, brother, sister, father, mother. We like to pretend that we’re not interconnected. We choose to disregard the fact that we all bleed the same blood, and instead choose to focus on who’s doing the bleeding. It’s ridiculous.

It shouldn’t be a question of who’s shooting who. It should be a question of why we are shooting in the first place. Why are we trying to justify one person taking the life of another? At the end of the day, we’re still losing someone who had worth. Whether they were an officer or a thug, they mattered. And now, their lives matter for different reasons.

Their lives, or rather the taking of their lives, matter now more than ever before. It’s drawing attention to a problem that many people would rather ignore. It’s drawing attention to the racism that still exists within our country, and I’m afraid it will only get worse. They say ignorance is bliss, but every time we pretend that we are all equal, we only perpetuate the divide between us. Until we can look at someone different from ourselves and see them as one of our own, we will never find peace.

America used to be the “greatest country in the world.” People had dreams of becoming a part of a nation that was so accepting, where you could become anything you wanted to be. And now, our very own people are unaccepting of others based on their skin color alone. This divide is deep, and is ruining our country. And it won’t get better unless people take it upon themselves to show a little more compassion and a lot less hate.