Sorry for the radio silence. I know, in the age of the algorithmic hot take, a three-day delay is practically an archaeological era. But truth be told, I needed a minute. Sometimes, when the universe decides to rhyme with its ugliest verses, you have to step back and let the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it all wash over you before you can even attempt to type a coherent sentence.
I’m talking, of course, about Minneapolis. Again.
If you haven’t heard—and if you haven’t, I envy the rock you’re living under; is there room for one more?—an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday. A 37-year-old mother, a writer, and a human being who, by all accounts, was doing that incredibly dangerous, “domestic terrorist” activity known as existing in her car.
The official narrative dropped faster than the body. “Domestic terrorism,” they called it. “Self-defense.” Because, naturally, when you are a heavily armed federal agent in full tactical gear, nothing screams “threat to national security” quite like a poet in a mid-sized SUV trying to drive away. The spin was so dizzying it could have powered the entire Midwestern grid. They painted a picture of a tactical assault; the video showed a panicked woman trying to escape a man with a gun.
This is where the sarcasm usually kicks in—my defense mechanism of choice—but frankly, it feels a bit thin today. It’s hard to be witty when the punchline is a grieving family and a community trapped in a recurring nightmare. We are less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered, and here we are again, watching the state enforce its will with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, while the FBI swoops in to “take over” the investigation like a parent shooing the kids away from a broken vase.
But there is a detail in this tragedy that breaks through the cynicism, a moment that illustrates the difference between humanism and statism better than any textbook ever could.
“I’m not mad at you.”
Those were Renee’s last words. She didn’t scream. She didn’t curse. She didn’t recite a manifesto. She looked a federal agent in the eye—a man dressed for war in a quiet neighborhood—and offered him a moment of bizarre, heartbreaking grace before he ended her life.
On one side, you have the State: cold, bureaucratic, violent, and obsessed with control. It is a dead force. It calls a mother a terrorist to save its own face. It retreats behind the shield of procedure where human lives are converted into paperwork.
On the other side, you have a woman whose Instagram bio described her as a “shitty guitar strummer.” A woman who, in the face of lethal escalation, remained so fundamentally civil that her final act was to reassure the man holding the gun. She saw a human being in that uniform, even when he refused to see one in her car.
This is why I delayed posting. It is excruciatingly difficult to preach the interconnectedness of all things when one part of that connection is holding a smoking gun and the other is bleeding out in the snow. It challenges the very core of what I believe.
But this is also where the optimism has to dig its heels in.
Optimism isn’t thinking everything will be fine. Optimism is seeing that everything is currently on fire and grabbing a bucket of water anyway, because you know there’s something in that house worth saving.
The State wants us to see a terrorist. The Humanist must insist on seeing the poet. We cannot let them steal her narrative. They can take the life, sadly—they have the bullets for that. But they cannot take the truth of that life unless we let them. If we let the “official story” stand, we are complicit. If we nod along to the “self-defense” spin, we are burying her twice.
The optimism here isn’t a sunny belief that “justice will be served”. I’m not naive; I know the legal system is often just a janitor for the state’s messes. The optimism is in the refusal to be gaslit. It is the stubborn, holy insistence that a mother is not a target, and that a government that fears its own citizens this much has already lost its moral mandate.
Renee Nicole Good was worth saving. Minneapolis is worth saving. And our collective humanity, battered and bruised as it is right now, is worth saving.
So, be the poet. Be the one who stays human, even when the world demands you become a soldier. Look at this ugliness and say, “I’m not mad at you.”
Let’s get back to work.
Justin Lockridge 
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