To keep U.S.-style violence at bay, we must …

Dallas Texas: 2,215.2 kilometres from Hamilton. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: 2,108.2 km. St. Paul, Minnesota: 1,427.1 km.

These sites of last week’s horrendous wave of racebased gun violence are hardly in our own backyard. So why does it feel to many of us like the walls are closing in — like it’s beginning to feel like an epidemic of hatred and violence is threatening us as well as our besieged American neighbours?

Hopefully, it is, in part, empathy. While we like to differentiate ourselves from Americans, we must also acknowledge there is more that unites us than sets us apart. If we don’t feel the pain of our neighbours to some degree, we’re not paying attention. Imagine being urban, poor and black in a major U.S. city today. Imagine being a police officer. Imagine being a black parent, fearing the worst as the situation deteriorates. Imagine being a leader on whose watch race issues have gone from being a ubiquitous problem and challenge to an outright civil crisis.

There is no real apples-to-apples comparison between our challenges and the ones facing American citizens. We don’t have their addiction to guns. We don’t have a constitutional right to bear arms. We don’t have the ridiculously powerful gun lobby. We don’t have the same degree of socioeconomic stratification. Their poverty is deeper and more entrenched, as are their racial divisions. So we may not have to worry about tensions turning deadly overnight the way they have in a growing number of U.S. cities.

But we are not immune. We have many of the same problems, just not to the same degree. We saw that illustrated in the controversy over Black Lives Matter in the Toronto Pride parade. Not only did BLM stop the parade, it demanded that police be excluded from future events. In some ways, you can’t blame the people represented by BLM. People who have too much experience with being carded or harassed. People who, rightly or wrongly, live in fear of police.

And yet BLM was — and is — wrong to try to build more walls between the police and community. We have enough of those as it is. You don’t solve a problem involving the police by excluding them. Surely members of Pride Toronto as well as BLM understand that as well or better than most of us. Exclusion will never be a winning or constructive policy.

Thankfully, we don’t have to live in the sort of fear that grips Dallas. We don’t have to worry that being pulled over for a broken tail light will lead to someone’s death, as was the case for Philando Castille in a quiet St. Paul suburb. But we are not as far removed from that reality as we might think. We must be more than on guard, we must be active and proactive. We must come together, not draw apart.