enuja

The day that Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis, I was somewhat taken aback that it was big news. As I said that day, is this going to be as big news as Charlie Kirk's assassination? ICE has murdered, and attempted to murder, quite a lot of people, including in Chicago. For some reason, I had assumed that the Chicago woman driving a car who was shot five times by ICE this past fall was a white woman, but it turns out she wasn't. And the race of those who are killed or shot is often a big variable in how viral their deaths become. (White women are mourned and paid attention to much more than all other murdered, missing, or surviving humans.)

Another important variable is the immediate availability of abundant video, and the extreme disconnect between what ICE and the federal government were saying versus what the Minneapolis and Minnesota law enforcement and government officials were saying. NPR and local WBEZ coverage initially parroted ICE's claim that Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, shot and killed in Franklin Park on September 12th, had seriously threatened the life of and injured an ICE officer with his car. In many ways, it was the disconnect between the initial reporting and subsequent reporting on these two incidents in Chicagoland that resulted in such immediate and heavy pushback by the Minneapolis locals, which was a big part of what made this such viral news.

The old cliche that "If it bleeds, it leads," is part of what has led me to avoid watching videos of violence. Just as watching too much local news leads to people believing that their local area is a adrift in violence, watching too many videos of murders makes one viscery believe that they are about to be murdered, too. Our human intuition is not great at statistics: we add up the possibilities we can think of, and the violent events we can remember, to get an idea of the risks. But the per capita violence now is much, much lower than it was in the '70s and '80s. It is cowardly of me, but I do think that it is good choice for me to maintain my hope and friendly good feeling towards other humans to avoid watching videos of violence and murder.

I get the vast majority of my news from WBEZ and NPR: I grew up listening to the radio instead of watching TV news, and I still listen to the radio, even though it's now almost entirely streaming, instead of the terrestrial radio of my youth. So it's really easy for me to avoid watching videos of murder, because I'm not watching most of my news. And the abundance and availability of video doesn't change how I perceive a story: either way, I'm just listening to it, not watching it. I value journalists in part for their willingness to subject themselves to watching the violence, to give me the summary without the trauma of actually watching the video myself.

So while I am somewhat confused about how big the news of Renee Nicole Good's murder has been, I'm not upset that it's big news. This is consistent with how the media works, even though it's not a thing I can effectively predict. It is part of the basic inequality in our society, that the murder of white women gets more media attention. But just as the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in 1965 led to significant attention and reform, I'm not sitting here trying to make fewer people talk about Renee Good.

Like Rene Good, I am also a presumably bisexual white woman, and I also have a picture of me by the beach with long hair and up close selfies of me with shaved or otherwise weird hair. I think everyone should experience both long hair and a shaved head in their lifetime: I'm not going to make people shave their head or grow out their hair, but I value having experienced both things, and I realized that not that many people have done so Renee Good did.

But, much more importantly than what Good and I personally share, I am very worried about the loss of a basic shared truth between political divides in the US. I'm also worried that the competing local and federal investigations into the killing of Renee Good, and the governor's possible future use of the Minnesota National Guard, along with the presence of many federal ICE agents could, conceivably, eventually result in civil war. And it's very important to me to promote peace, justice, and freedom, not war. Also, the federal government has paused SNAP funding Minnesota. That's just diabolical.

In a decade, will here be a politics-independent consensus that Renee Good was murdered? Over the next three years, will SNAP recipients in Democratic states consistently get their benefits? Will the United States descend into civil war in my lifetime?

As I said, I'm not good at predicting the mass behavior of humans. I don't know the answer to any of those questions about the future. I don't even know what Republicans overall think right now about whether Renee Good was murdered by that ICE agent. I am very upset about the current state of US democracy, the social safety net, and safety on the streets from the actions of ICE agents.

I am very lucky to feel hardly any fear. One specific moment when I was afraid was watching the pointy teeth of a school of barracuda staring at me as I snorkeled in the Florida keys as a teenager. But this was not fear that made me get out of the water: this was a fear that made me remember the precious and amazing moment for the rest of my life.

I've always lived in fairly safe neighborhoods, my parents instilled in me a confidence in walking around as many neighborhoods as possible, and I'm extremely lucky to have never been attacked, so I don't have fear as a trauma response.

I went to some trainings as a girl scout, including things like the advice to hold your keys between your knuckles in case you are threatened in the parking lot at night, and to always carry a whistle and pepper spray, just in case. But my parents dismissed all of this as counterproductive fear-mongering.

But now, I have a tiny whistle on my key chain. It will always be with me. And I don't have it for fear that someone is going to attack me, I have it for fear that someone in a mask, in a car without license plates, is going to grab someone else on the street in front of me, just because their skin is brown and they are speaking Spanish.

I am proud to have this whistle on me, as a talisman to remind me to act and to record instead of just to watch, to protect those around me from immoral overreach by the government.