Sometimes, a flood of thoughts is worse for writing than not being able to come up with any. This has been one of those weeks. Even last week’s Nicking from Novels, about a book that I truly enjoyed reading, seemed…trivial. There has been so much happening in the world, so much happening at home. Some of it has just been busy-ness: events, appointments, getting ductwork replaced so the air conditioner conditions all of the house’s air. More of the flood has come from the ugliness of the news. I’ve seen calls for armed revolt just because a politician didn’t get indicted. I’ve seen somebody write “White people can’t speak our mind in this country anymore” in support of a comparison of Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan.

And all of that leaves out what actually happened: people were killed with bullets and with bombs, in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights and Dallas and Baghdad. Riot police looking like stormtroopers hauling in women in summer dresses. Protesters throwing rocks and rebar and fireworks at police on I-94. Blood.

People killed people, and our media and our conversations immediately folded them into the narratives of presidential politics and culture war. Instead of “why did this happen?”, we so often frame the question as “whose fault is this?” (The cops’ for being racist, the victims’ for being uncooperative, the protesters’ for inciting violence…)

Look, the world doesn’t need another white dude to hurl a cri de coeur out into the world wide ether. It needs people—it needs us—to engage with one another and with institutions to make change happen.

It needs “how can I help?” to mean more than “how can I help without inconveniencing myself?” I think that’s what it has often meant for me: my answers amounted to “keep being a good person.” That helps! It is better to be a good person than a selfish person, better to practice empathy in our daily lives and try to understand our neighbors. I’ve written about this each of the past two summers. In 2015 it was Paris and Syria and Chicago and Chennai. In 2014 it was Ferguson and Ukraine and Gaza. For too many people, nothing has changed since then.

If we really want things to be better for our fellow humans, we need not just to be good people, but to be better people. We have to work. Listening can be work, but I think a lot of us have listened enough. We need to keep listening, always, but we have to understand that change worth having is change worth making sacrifices for. That can be money for bail funds or time for protests or toner for letters to your representatives or the work to actually run for office yourself. It needs to be voting, too, and trying to understand the local politics that the big media instruments aren’t shouting about.

It means resisting distraction, even when that seems to be the primary mission of the machines through which we route our lives.