The Coffee Table

Where the terror lies

Roughly forty-eight hours after Renee Nicole Macklin Good was killed in Minneapolis, I was out of sorts. Couldn’t get motivated to do things but didn’t feel right sitting down. Wasn’t sure if I was lonesome, depressed, or maybe coming down with something.

I didn’t connect my malaise with the shooting until almost dusk on Friday evening. Finally anger, dismay, fear, and bewilderment came bubbling up in sobs and tears, prompting an awareness that I’m living through a segment of American history that will be seen as distinctly dismal, if history is recorded with any truth whatsoever. My homeland, the free country where I was born and raised and have lived my entire life, has become a place of government-sanctioned terror.

Regardless of what one thinks about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or its mission of deporting people purported to be in the country illegally, the shooting of Ms. Good should serve as an obvious indication that armed masked men shouting orders is not the best way to ensure compliance with officers of the law. If I were in the driver’s seat where Ms. Good sat, my life-long training as a woman in a nation where misogyny runs rampant, combined with my fight or flight instinct, would likely tell me to step on the gas and get away.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what transpired because I wasn’t there. I’ve seen multiple videos and read first person accounts, but the fact remains that I wasn’t there—so I can’t know for sure how the scene played out.  But President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also were not there. Yet they quickly proclaimed the fault of the killing lay with the victim. Trump said Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer…” Vance declared the shooting “…is a tragedy of her own making.” Noem declared Good’s action “an act of domestic terrorism.” Publicly jumping to these conclusions prior to a thorough investigation of the events doesn’t make anyone feel safer—except, maybe, ICE agents. Consider Vance’s declaration about the agent involved: “That guy is protected by absolute immunity…”

A chilling statement.

What I do know is that I would have been terrified. Whatever my reasoning for being in that place at that moment, when armed masked men are coming for me, I would have been afraid. And fear clouds judgment.  

Apparently, Jonathan Ross, the agent involved in the incident, also had reason to be afraid. After explaining that Ross had twice, in the last six months, been hit by motor vehicles, the vice president stated, “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile…” Perhaps Vance can cut the agent some slack. But it makes me wonder why the officer was directed to go on duty if he was on edge. Fear clouds judgment.

Noam called the agent “an experienced officer who followed his training.”

But several law enforcement officials publicly stated that officers are trained not to position themselves in front of vehicles, and to avoid shooting into moving vehicles. Is ICE training different?

My initial—instinctive—reaction to the incident was rage at a government thug. But the enduring terror lies in the response of the executive branch of our federal government. By publicly leaping to the defense of the shooter rather than assuring the population at large there will be a fair and impartial investigation of what transpired, our leaders are telling us no-one is safe. Ever. Anybody’s murder can be rationalized, letting government employees—and elected officials—off the hook.