Murder in Minneapolis. Again.

It feels like early spring this morning. The sun is out and quite brilliant despite its distance in the southern sky. The late Fall and early Spring sun always has a liminal length to it that I find comforting. My house is quiet after the holidays. There are echoes of adolescents and grandparents bustling about that amplify the silence with which I now sit. I am content with both.

Yet, this picturesque morning and warm internal homecoming exists in a conjunctive contrast with a world just beyond my street.

America in 2026, Berlin in 1936: There is an ideological aesthetic they both share — an aesthetic that cannot be safely ignored or dismissed with the false exceptionalism that it could never possibly happen here. Not only can it happen, it has happened here – more than once. Indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples with histories know this all too well.

A bland statement from the White House: Dateline – US withdrawing from 35 non-UN organizations and 31 UN entities that “operate contrary to US national interests”. Such statements are the handbag accessories of the fascist chic de jure.

Just 5-days past, we, the self-proclaimed arbiters of “freedom” illegally kidnapped a foreign leader and attacked a sovereign nation without cause. Please don’t clutch your pearls and speak of DOJ indictments while you ignore 91 and 34.

Yesterday, Minneapolis once again became the center of a foundational moral choice – the locus of state approved political murder watched worldwide. A 37-year-old woman named Renee Good, trying to help her community – shot in the head, left to die – leaving a 6-year-old at home.

The response has predictably fallen along the split-screen realities within which we exist.

But we need to be clear, the screen one watches is the screen one chose. The choice, a reflection of one’s inner truth no matter what one tries to tell oneself. There is no place to hide from one’s inner self.

I have been following the coverage as much as my sanity will allow. Scrolling through the social media reports of outrage, thinly veiled justifications and obfuscations more enraging still.

I watch the winter sun spread across my lawn. Squirrels chase each other up and down a large maple tree.

I am living inside a contradiction, trying to understand the right thing to do.

I realize, being no one particularly special, I must do what common people of conscience must do.

I must not look the other way — and hope.

I must not speak in euphemisms — rather, I must clearly mean what I say.

We must all ask ourselves — are we willing to accept this as who we have become?

We must all ask ourselves the unavoidable question — in order to look ourselves in the eye, what must we now do?

Such questions cannot be left unanswered — even if one closes one’s eyes.