After Dallas police shootings: Is the right to speak unfiltered on social media a good thing?

What do you say?

Good question.

Cops shoot civilians. Snipers shoot cops. People die. PEOPLE DIE. And we are expected to somehow make sense of it, and it makes no sense at all. The news out of Dallas Thursday night, that five police officers were killed by snipers while working at a peaceful protest, was stunning. So was the video the day before of a police officer shooting a Black man to death, less than 48 hours after a white officer killed a Black man in Baton Rouge.

My kids kept asking why this happened. I had no answers. If anyone does, pass them along. We could use them.

Like most journalists, I began my career as a cop reporter. Many of us go on to other pursuits, but that hunger for a story, the excitement of a story breaking right now, never goes away. It’s like a kind of radar you develop that you can never really turn off.

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Again, like most journalists, my idea of what a story is has changed. As has how we get readers to see our content and where we get our news.

Social media is a big part of this. It brings people to our stories. It’s almost exclusively where I first hear of breaking news, and I suspect that’s true of most people.

It’s also a sounding board, a microphone. Anyone can say (almost) anything there, and I firmly believe that most of the time this is a really good thing. We should all have a voice. The Constitution guarantees it, a right that is far more important to our idea of a nation than being able to own an assault rifle. Fighting words for some, I know, but that’s the price you pay for living here. You don’t have to listen, but you can’t shut me up. Nor I you. As it should be.

But to look at social media lately, and particularly in the wake of these shootings, is disturbing. Depressing. Alarming. Most do not offers solutions, outside of pabulum (“Prayer!”), only complaint (insert coded racist tweet of your choice here).

Yes, we are a partisan nation. We know this. The current presidential campaign, on both sides, is based on this notion — "I'm right, you're not just wrong, you're a bad person."

That’s base stupidity, but no one seems particularly eager to change the tone of the conversation. And the conversation rages unfiltered on social media. Scroll your Twitter feed, your Facebook feed. Look at what you find there: blame, anger, hate. And I get it. We’re confused. No one knows what to say, or what to think. Yet we rage on.

On some level it’s probably healthy. Get it off your chest. Pent-up rage is dangerous. On the other hand — and I say this as a huge fan and user of social media — I’m starting to think that it’s unhealthy and even more dangerous than measured silence, at least at times. I’m reminded of the stories of Abraham Lincoln writing scathing letters to people he was mad at. And then burning them in a wood stove.

I love social media. And I hate a lot of what’s going on there right now. The freedom to say what is on our minds is essential. So is the good sense to sometimes refrain from doing so.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.