On the day Renee Good was murdered, I saw my country burning—not from the righteous and necessary rejection of the horror of a rogue regime, but from the cruelty and corruption of that regime. People resisting evil brought peace and reverence; those pretending to represent the law brought chaos and terror.

It was, in the midst of horror, reassuring to learn that Minneapolis Police officers called in paramedics and then rode in the ambulance, apparently to protect the victim who had been denied medical attention after being shot. Serving and protecting.

Three things stood out clearly, and I believe tens of millions of us recognized this: 

1. A government that takes life with such ease is rejecting our founding laws and operating in a criminal fashion.
2. Every official sworn to uphold the Constitution has an irreducible legal and moral duty to use their authority to stop this paramilitary violence.
3. Many Americans do not really understand the state of menace their own neighbors and friends have been subjected to.

This last point is the one that has gotten the least attention. Millions of innocent people in the United States have been subjected for years to both direct and indirect threats of violence and abuse by the same people who have orchestrated this new campaign of lawless terror.

Many good people have been forced from public office or political activism by menacing threats from Trump-linked extremists. That has been a sad constant since 2015. Many good-hearted people who vote Republican do not fully understand that their own choices have been limited and preconditioned by this campaign of threats. 

That terror has a cost; it leaves people one or two degrees removed from the threat experiencing real trauma and grief, even if they bravely resist the intended debilitating effect. Millions of Americans have lived and accumulated this trauma, as friends, colleagues, or people they admire or support have been attacked or menaced.

• In 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a violent criminal who had long before disgraced the badge and disqualified himself from service, but who had been protected by others who did not see his cruelty and violence as criminal.
• Days later, far-right terrorists inspired by Trump fired sniper rounds and incendiaries into the 3rd Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, attempting to start what they hoped would be an actual civil war—less than a mile from where I lived.
• Shortly after, two more Trump-inspired civil war “accelerationists” were arrested for plotting to blow up the building next to ours.
• My wife and I met Melissa Hortman through mutual friends in Minnesota. She was a respected and principled public servant who was respected by members of both parties for her values and her service. In June, she and her husband were murdered by a man who wanted to establish a totalitarian theocracy.
• Other people we know personally were reported to be on the assassin’s target list.
• Renee Good was murdered less than a mile from where we used to live. 

Minneapolis is an open-hearted place, where people of all political leanings take seriously the core responsibility to make open and responsible civics a living reality. In Minneapolis, we met many people like Renee Good who were quick to be kind, smile at strangers, refuse to be incited to anger, who have creative talents and believe in teaching and practicing tolerance, so we might all be free people in a self-governing society.

As more and more information surfaces, it feels like Renee Good was murdered, because she would not believe that anger and violence are the way of our society, because she was evidently unterrorized and undiminished, unconvinced and unimpressed by lawless and menacing behavior. 

Many Americans have lived through this particular kind of unnoticed violence—where mercenary militants, delusional psychopaths, and people who seem to think Trump will help them commit genocide against their fellow citizens in a lunatic “race war”, have caused good people to disappear from our politics and brought hate and violence to our communities.

We need to talk about this.

Republicans terrorized by Trump and the militants he incites need to know they are not alone, that non-Republicans stand with them, and that law enforcement will find and prosecute the people behind the threats. Courts and juries must not allow lawless hate and violence to distort and disable what was once a functioning free society.

We need to talk about the degree of psychological violence being done to people, communities, and institutions, across the country—including the Republican Party itself—by this worsening campaign of menace and threat. We need to talk about the unseen trauma suffered by so many people, even those who avoid political news and discussion or consider themselves neutral on questions of party, policy, or ideology.

“[A]ll life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a well-known address at Oberlin College, adding: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” He quoted the poet John Donne, who wrote: 

“any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

King and Donne understood that when evil affects others, it also affects us. How could any person of conscience not be affected when someone is harmed or abused, or shot in the face after offering a kind greeting? However removed we are from the devastation, its shrapnel lands in our soul and begins making quiet havoc.

That quiet havoc is made worse by the observable reality of a callous disregard for human life. We know there is callous disregard, because specific events have shown that is the currently governing attitude, and because the resulting actions have led to widespread suffering and death. 

• The shock defunding and later dismantling of USAID—actions for which there was no lawful authority—have led to the deaths of 740,000 people around the world, including 500,000 children.
• This was projected and the consequences were known. The illegal action was taken anyway, and that money has not been used to help anyone at home.
• Non-communicable diseases take 43 million lives per year, including more than 3 million Americans.
• The Trump administration has sought to kill a global declaration on the urgent need to reduce NCD deaths, defunded health research and healthcare coverage, food assistance, and childcare.
• By making these choices, the government that is ordering the removal of rights protections , while abusing and abducting citizens, and randomly attacking people in the streets, has decided to abandon 30 million Americans and 400 million more people around the world over the next 10 years, many of whom might be saved from preventable death.
• None of this is unknown or hard to verify. Since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017, around 19.8 million Americans have been killed by NCDs, guns, crashes, and drugs. Adding COVID brings that number to more than 21 million.
• To reaffirm this callous disregard for life, the EPA has said it will stop estimating the health benefits and lives saved from its efforts to control pollution, even though it is required by law to prevent harm to human health.
• Meanwhile, video from Minneapolis shows ICE agents roving wildly like a street gang through a popular shopping, dining, and residential area of the city, firing abortifacient chemicals into the air.

Our right to exist in a healthy, liberated, just and lawfully governed civil society is paramount. The Bill of Rights opens with our freedom to think and speak without being menaced by rogue paramilitaries, and it ends with the reminder that power ultimately resides in the people, not those who temporarily hold public office. 

Rights are paramount. Power is subordinate.

Menace is incompatible with freedom. Impunity is incompatible with freedom. Rights are rights, because they are universal. You are free, because I am free, but I am not free unless you are as well. All of us are free human beings with unalienable rights, or we are not.

This covenant was written into the Declaration of Independence, just before the signatures: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Those that reject that covenant, who treat the rights of others as irrelevant to them, or who seek to profit or empower themselves by leveraging power to intimidate or diminish others, are rejecting the republic itself and its founding purpose.

The United States was founded to “establish justice”, work toward a “more perfect” civic collaboration for the expansion of human freedom, and to deliver for future generations. The goal is to create better and better conditions for liberated human thriving, by resolving historic injustices and ending tyrannical and corrupt rule. Part of our hidden collective trauma is that every day prominent and influential voices, including elected public servants, are telling us that we must let go of this founding purpose of our republic.

A government that tells you to see mere existence as “terrorism”, that demands you accept that its agents may threaten, tackle, torment, and even kill civilians, with impunity, that issues “red line” warnings suggesting more people will be killed to silence dissent, is telling you it will use lies and threats to control you and end your freedom.

Totalitarian terror has no place, not for one second, in a free society. 

It is not a crime to be a witness. It is not a crime to exist in the streets of your community. It is not a crime to notice the difference between Constitutional law enforcement and lawless paramilitary menace. The only reason observing or filming would “impede” an ICE “operation” is that the agents know they are breaking the law and violating people’s rights, denying due process or acting outside the authority created by a judicial warrant.

Speak up for humanity; speak up for basic rights; speak up for decency. Honor good cops by distinguishing them from violent criminals who disgrace the uniform and betray the people they are sworn to serve. Use your voice and your civic self, peacefully, to prevent senseless trauma; help others weave the fabric of human decency that makes freedom real.