We all want this to stop, right?

The nightly riots in Portland, with programmed destruction having nothing to do with racial injustice.

The daily murders in Chicago and New York, including random shootings of young children.

The politicized debates over police defunding and the worthiness of statues.

We’ve come a long way in the wrong direction since the senseless killing of George Floyd.

And the high-speed rail taking us to this place of despair is a contrived telling of history and events geared to political upheaval, not progress.

The trainmasters are not teaching history, they are using it. They are not reporting events, they are selecting pieces creating a self-serving narrative.

And so, a hundred days of violence in Portland is reported as “largely peaceful demonstrations” by 90 percent of the media that has become a co-conspirator in an inaccurate passion play. Peaceful demonstrations don’t include people with masks to hide identity and ear pieces that program them into organized violence against police, with transported pallets of fireworks, explosives and bricks.

We are told statues of people who founded and guided this country should be removed because they owned slaves, excluding the reality that slave-owning was the rule, not the exception, three centuries ago. That doesn’t make it right, but assigning the morals of today to mores 250 years ago is no way to judge anybody.

It does work if anarchy is the goal. And it works even more if corrupted elements in the media will conveniently transport incomplete history to the doorstep of millions of viewers and readers.

We want to erase and deface the culture of the South that led to the Civil War rather than studying the time and region. What do we learn from demonizing a culture and its leaders? Nothing.

And now most of the politicized history tellers and their media partners want to demonize all police, putting them in a box labeled “systemic racism.” The response is a war on police precincts, looting rationalized as “reparations”, and calls to defund and defang police.

What is the result? More lawlessness, waves of retirements from the demoralized who make up 99.9 percent of those in uniform, record-setting murder rates and destruction of businesses and neighborhoods in scores of cities. And when there is an incident, such as the one Sunday night in Wisconsin, we assume police did wrong. We riot first, and ask questions later, if at all.

The only thing more heinous than these acts is the doctoring of reality by corrupt media who won’t show video of what is really happening in Portland and Chicago and New York, politicians who want to excuse looting as a struggle to survive (you don’t eat Nikes) and a major party convention that does not call out this madness because it is happening in cities controlled by that party.

What makes me certain of the falsehoods and contrived story line?

A life timeline that allowed participation in the original peace marches and racial demonstrations of the late 60s and early 70s.

My coming of age – that is “wokeness” these days – was two years at a Southern university, with dormitory suitemates representing multiple races, hippies, social activists, spoiled rich kids and Yankees. Together, we learned the lessons of a lifetime, that we are all brothers and sisters, joined by a diverse ancestory that ends at the same place — Americans.

The resident adviser on our floor would later become the first black district attorney in Orange County, North Carolina and eventually a judge.

All of us – regardless of backgrounds and cultures – were proud of our roots, aware of the good in our world but just as “woke” of the need to change much of what we were seeing.

And so, while learning to become journalists, pharmacists, lawyers and business people, we were demonstrating in the hope the world we would some day be leading would be a better place.

That is because we were given the best lesson of all – balance.

Balance allows, through life experience, the possibility that each of us can prune out the wrong and live what is right.

Today, the goal of too many “educators”, political flesh peddlers and media movers is not balance, but indoctrination.

The end product is a perversion of social activism. We are told this is the 60s all over again. The mayor of Seattle called nightly rioting “a summer of love.”

That’s an insult to those who actually lived the summer of love.

We know what real problems look like. We know they can be solved because we have lived through cultural progress. We also know there is more to do.

And we know the contrived chaos media malpractice is giving us will not produce anything like the advances that came of our era of advancement. Because the people pushing the narrative are not “a thousand people in the streets” but political pushers.

David F. Troisi is retired as editor of the Sun-Gazette.