Reaping the whirlwind

The murders of Alex Pretti and Renne Good have shaken the country.  We have come face-to-face with the violence that is required to keep the empire of racial capital going.  Much as the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner reverberated around the country more than sixty years ago, the violence that is such a part of our culture has been laid bare for all to see. And it has sparked outrage.

The movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd exposed to the world the enormous costs of a culture built on violence. We are again facing the dehumanization embedded in our ways of living.  More and more of us are rejecting this culture of violence and seeking new values upon which to construct our futures. This longing is captured in the slogans ringing throughout the neighborhoods of Minneapolis: 

No hate, no fear—immigrants are welcome here.

We will love our neighbors, we will not be moved.

Love our neighbors as ourselves.

For some of us, that new way simply means getting rid of Trump and his sadistic henchmen. Certainly, they need to go. But the reality is that they are as much the product of the violence of our culture as they are its perpetrators.

Alex Pretti is not the first or only person to be thrown to the ground, disarmed, and shot in the head with his face pressed to the earth.  Hakim Littleton was executed by Detroit police in the summer of 2020. We watched his death, frame by frame.

Alex Pretti was not the first or only person to be shot to death by officers claiming they saw a gun. Amadou Diallo, reaching for his wallet, was shot 41 times by NY police in 1999, with19 of the bullets ripping through his young body.

Nor is Renee Good the first or only person to be shot to death in front of their partner and child.  Philando Castile was killed by a St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer in 2016. The officer fired his gun seven times at close range in front of his partner and her 4-year-old daughter. Their blood mingles in the Minnesota soil.

Death at the hands of agents of the state is a common experience in America. Since the movements for Black Liberation and human rights of the 1960’s and 70’s, much of that daily violence remained out of public view, especially that of white Americans.  Only the most egregious actions found their way into our collective conscience. 

Even now, as we watch armed soldiers invade cities, much of the violence is hidden. Between July 2025 and January 202,6 35 people have died in Trump detention centers. At least 8 people have been murdered by agents. No one is counting the injuries, trauma, and psychological damage to those who are kidnapped and caged. Or to those who witness it.

The violence spreading through our communities on the direct orders of this president is familiar not only because of what our own police do every day, but because of what our military does in places we rarely consider. Armed execution squads in the USA tactical gear are all too familiar to the people of Fallujah or Baghdad. 

Our past records some of the most violent acts committed by human beings against each other and the earth of any people, anywhere.  Our present is consumed by it. But this need not be our future.

The violence we are now experiencing is the death throes of empire. As Chris Hedges recently observed:

What the rest of us are facing now is what Aimé Césaire called the imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, in the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.

Our future is being shaped as we come to a reckoning. We can still choose life, choose love, choose to build a world that embraces sacred freedoms. The possibilities for such a future are emerging one neighborhood at a time.