Well, I suppose 240 years was a pretty good run.

It seems a shame — especially with the blown-out candles on the birthday cake still smoldering from her July 4 party — but I fear that America is finally, and possibly irreparably, broken.

I’m not talking about the recent shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota, Texas and elsewhere. Horrifying as they are, there have been and always will be bad people intent on hurting good people. What I’m talking about is the way we seem to be responding to these events.

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I’ve heard it said when a married couple suffers a tragedy — say, the loss of a child — the stress either draws them closer as a couple or drives them apart permanently. And in this great Republic of a relationship, it all comes down to one sad narrative: You’re either on the side of black people or on the side of law enforcement. It’s either “Black Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” You’ve got to make a choice. Sorry, but you can’t have both.

Why? Because if you happen to say black lives matter, you can’t possibly mean that other lives — including those in the law enforcement community — matter as well. And if you say you support law enforcement, you’ve somehow just trivialized the loss of black individuals at the hands of racist police officers.

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Right now, it all comes down to those two colors. Black and blue. I can’t help but wonder if we’d still have this problem if everyone in the world suddenly lost their eyesight. Maybe a blind world would finally begin to see?

The truth is, it’s not black people shooting white cops and it’s not white cops killing black people. Bad people shoot cops and equally bad people shoot blacks. You’d think we could at least get that one little detail right.

Maybe we’ve always been this messed up in this country, but we just didn’t know it. Maybe with social media and smartphone cameras everywhere, our eyes are finally open.

We can watch a man bleed to death, live, before our very eyes, as was the case this past week when Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer in Minnesota. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, broadcast his final moments in real time on Facebook.

Later, handcuffed in the back of a police car with her 4-year-old daughter by her side and the camera still running, Reynolds becomes despondent and cries out in anguish for her boyfriend. At which point her daughter — who had been in the back seat of that car with the broken tail light and thus a witness to Castile’s violent death — told her mother in a brave voice that will haunt me to my dying day: “It’s OK, I’m right here with you.”

But it’s not OK. It’s not OK at all. We’ve somehow become horribly broken in this country.

Remember how we used to smugly scoff at the sectarian violence that’s torn apart the Middle East for centuries? How we couldn’t understand why groups of people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan just couldn’t get along? And yet here we are, unable to put aside our differences and unite as a country against a growing evil that is neither black nor white nor blue.

During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, it was Rodney King, the man beaten by the very police officers whose acquittals were credited with triggering that unrest, who famously asked, “Can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?”

So? Can we?

Survey says: Not likely. Because today, 24 years later, it is Philando Castile’s girlfriend who makes that desperate plea. As she sat handcuffed in the back of that police car with her 4-year-old daughter, she continued recording on her smartphone.

“Ya’ll please pray for us,” she cried. “Jesus, please, y’all. I ask everybody on Facebook, everybody that’s watching, everybody that’s tuned in, please pray for us.”

Because, frankly, a prayer may be all we have left in this country.

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SEMarkSaal.