Wednesday night, a grand jury in New York City refused to indict police officers in the killing of Eric Garner, a man who died after officers used a prohibited choke hold on him. The decision set off protests across the country.

The events in Ferguson, Missouri this past week have been both shocking and traumatizing. We are a nation at war with ourselves and have been since the late 1980s when the terrible “war on drugs” began to take on a paramilitary tone – as defined by Webster’s dictionary “of or relating to a group that is not an official army but that operates and is organized like an army.”