Twenty years ago, O. J. Simpson was on trial for the murder of his ex wife and her boyfriend. The crime and subsequent trial divided America almost exactly in half by race.

Watch this video (link) to see how clearly this issue was divided along racial lines.

The trouble with this reaction is that O. J. Simpson was very clearly, obviously guilty of the murders, and the black community was reveling in the fact that he got away with it. Why is it okay for a racial group to almost universally revel in an obvious injustice? Is justice “an eye for an eye?” The message on October 3, 1995 was pretty clear: while it’s not okay for a white person to kill a black person, it is gloriously justified when a black person kills a white person. Revenge is right. Revenge is good.

Last year a police officer killed a suspect in Ferguson, Missouri. I very seriously doubt the shooting was racially motivated. The officer, Darren Wilson, had no record of racially motivated behavior, and a grand jury … a grand jury … declined to indict him.

Thankfully we have a shallow, self-serving media who was eager to repeatedly say a white police officer shot a black teenager.

The truth is, I probably would have shot Michael Brown: the grand jury backs me up. I don’t say this because I lust for killing a black-skinned teenager. I say this because cops face intense stress and intense pressure, and face real threats to themselves and civilians they are sworn to protect every day, threats a typical civilian can’t even imagine. If I was a cop and a big, young, apparently aggressive person of any color posed the same threat Darren Wilson faced, I probably would have shot him.

Last month, a Muskogee, Oklahoma police officer shot a suspect who was reportedly at a wedding to murder someone, who ran from the officer, and who turned and brandished a pistol.

I probably would have shot him, too: If you look at the body cam video, you will see the police officer shooting a suspect who is turning to run away. Yet, this is probably going to be ruled a justifiable use of deadly force. In the video, you will see the suspect running away, dropping a firearm, then turning to pick it up. At this point, the officer decides to shoot, and once that decision is made, there’s really no stopping it, regardless of what the suspect does next. It works the same way a batter decides to swing at a pitch; the event happens so fast, the batter has to decide to swing or not during the first third of the ball’s flight to the plate. That’s why pitches with movement, curves, sliders and knuckleballs, are so effective.

Watch how fast that all happens, and tell me you would be able to make as measured a choice as you did sitting at your computer typing in the comments field of the video.

Is it really necessary to say the cop was white and the suspect was black? Read the comments on the video and you’ll find out how important it is for millions of people to hate something, anything, and to respond with verbal advocation of violence. The paradigm seems to be a desire to behave like wild, vicious animals combined by some trigger, often isolated and somewhat insignificant, labeled as justification.

While I am on the subject of outright bigotry, why do gays like to say homosexuals are “born gay”? It implies that they know how every gay person was born, raised and lived. It implies that their arguments for gay rights are everyone’s arguments. If you were born gay, fine. If you choose to be gay, fine. Just stop telling me that “all gays” are anything. That’s bigotry.

By the way, opponents of gay marriage, you are replaying almost word-for-word the arguments against equal rights for blacks in the 1960s. It makes you look backwards now, and 30 years from now you will look as much like inbred hillbillies as the Alabama whites in 1962 do today.