Personal essays
How do we even wrap our minds around all of this?
Our moral crisis
When Elena died nearly twenty years ago -
I know. It’s unbelievable that it’s been that long.
Anyway, we had to wait for the coroner’s office to examine her body before it was released to us to be buried.
It was a horror on top of the other horrors that Kim and I were dealing with but we took a breath and we understood.
When a child dies suddenly and unexpectedly, the authorities want to make sure that the parents were not abusing or otherwise mistreating the child - particularly if those parents are responsible for other children.
So, as much as it shook us to think about officials examining this child’s body or that we could be suspected of such a thing, it made sense to us that this was the proper thing to do.
I can’t, on the other hand, understand in the wake of the killing of Renee Good that officials decided to investigate her widow and not the man who shot her to death or the circumstances that surrounded the shooting.
How could her widow’s political leanings have led to her being shot?
Let me be clear here - if you think you have an answer to that question, or, despite the video evidence to the contrary believe she was trying to run over the officers, we will never understand each other.
If you think, “well both sides…”, please understand we won’t be able to have a civil discussion.
As Bernice King reminded us this week, “What we are witnessing now (masked raids, people taken without due process, vigilante, Gestapo, and slave patrol-like tactics normalized under the color of law) is a moral crisis.”
“Daniel,” you say, “you’re bumming me out.”
Yeah. It’s a moral crisis.
Kyle
Five and a half years ago, Kyle Rittenhouse travelled from Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin with an AR-15 style assault rifle to “protect local businesses.”
Across state lines.
He shot three people and killed two of them.
He was acquitted for self defense.
None of the people who are today asking what Renee Good was doing there were then asking what Kyle Rittenhouse was doing where he was.
He wouldn’t have had to argue self-defense if he hadn’t travelled to patrol the streets of someone else’s town - unbidden - with an assault rifle.
I remember the images of him carrying a gun walking the streets.
When I asked what he was doing driving towards trouble and carrying a gun, I was told it’s our second amendment rights to do so.
It could be time for a well-regulated militia but Pam Bondi tells Governor Walz that it’s not.
My mind is everywhere. It hardly knows where to be.
Alex
Somehow the image of Kyle carrying his gun is linked in my mind to the government complaining that Alex was carrying a gun.
Alex?
Alex Pretti, the nurse who stepped forward to help a woman who was being pepper sprayed this week. He had his phone in one hand and nothing in the other hand.
Despite video evidence of this, the government claims he was brandishing a gun - not an assault weapon like Kyle Rittenhouse - a pistol. They claim he was threatening the officers.
They wrestled him to the ground. They subdued him. They took his gun. And then, when he was no threat to anyone, he was shot to death.
Well he was never a threat to anyone.
What about the officer who shot him? What happened to him?
Action
The man who killed Kim nearly ten years ago -
I know. It’s unbelievable that it’s been that long.
Anyway, he spent three days in jail and his insurance paid some money in a settlement.
I’m told that it meant he had trouble getting work driving trucks after he ran her over. That felt appropriate given that he hit her when taking his eyes off the road to reach for the mobile phone that he’d dropped on the floor.
The man who killed Renee Good won’t spend that long in jail and didn’t miss work. He looked at the woman he killed and called her a “fucking bitch.”
I felt that slap in the face six hundred miles away.
The man who killed Alex Pretti walked away from the scene without even preserving evidence so it could be properly investigated.
In her statement Bernice King reminds us that “Nonviolence demands more than outrage; it demands action.”
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 305. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe