The Devil's Cowardice
In memory of Renee Nicole Good, 37.
“Good can be radical. Evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension—and this is its horror—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
“Tyranny is seldom (in the long run) imposed on people from without, it is a projection of their own pusillanimity.” — Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry
Yesterday, Renee Nicole Good was shot at point blank range, in broad daylight, by a masked ICE agent. The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a human being, was caught on video, from multiple angles. Some eight hours later, over ten thousand Minnesotans showed up to a vigil in Renee’s memory.
As of writing, it has been but some twenty-four hours since Renee was murdered. Seeing as how the propagandists and the charlatans, the mouthpieces of fascism and their lapdogs, were already out defending ICE within hours of the shooting, lying, twisting the truth, constructing a narrative that goes against what you can see for yourself, with your own eyes, it is more important, and urgent, than ever to speak out in the name of truth and basic human decency.
Years of witnessing atrocities play out in real time should not desensitize us to the vile, shocking, and unprecedented nature of these atrocities. The genocide in Gaza, which Israel continues to perpetrate to this very moment, was, is, a precursor to the violence that now haunts our cities, obscured in mask and shadow (though they are seemingly accountable to no one), lawless and out for blood, with the full backing of a corrupt state. Trained for forty-seven days, the President’s favorite number, then given a license to kill. It’s no surprise one witness to yesterday’s tragedy described the ICE agents as children.
As many have pointed out, the militarized violence that we as a nation have manufactured and exported for decades has found its way back home, repelled by the limits of a frontier that, wherever it settled its borders, could not settle for long.
The boomerang has returned as a toxic dust cloud, a phantasmagorical vapor, white as death, drifting down every street, around every corner, making its way to the doorsteps of the innocent, those guilty of living not in the darkness of fear but in the light of basic human decency, making their way the best they can, committing their effort and will not toward spreading violence, hatred, and misery, but doing the best they can out of a shared hope for a better future, for a better present, out of dignity, out of respect, out of a dream of prosperity not for the few but for the many. For the right to wake up and live not in terror, but in love, in love for the gift of life itself, a gift which, on Wednesday morning, was taken from Renee Good.
Make no mistake, the vast majority of people are absolutely disgusted and horrified by what happened yesterday. And people are scared. Even those defending the actions of the ICE agent who shot Renee Good speak from a place of fear. But those whose aim it is to control traffic in fear, because fear paralyzes. The road to a better world, however, is a movement, taken one step at a time. It is a departure from the inertia of a broken world, from broken promises, broken patterns, the sharp fragments of incomplete architecture, ruins in the shape of misery and death.
Mere hours after Renee’s murder, armed Border Patrol agents showed up to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis and physically harassed students, forcing the district to shut down classes for the rest of the week. This morning, in Sacramento, ICE/DHS agents were caught of film defacing a memorial for Renee. When confronted by a protester for this disgusting show of pettiness, a trio of DHS/ICE thugs attempt to intimidate the man, who replies with, “Behind that badge, you’re a coward. Renee Good is a mother that [was] standing up for our rights and was murdered.” The agents retreat inside.
It is not enough that they are allowed to kill, kidnap, and wreak absolute havoc with fatal abandon. Even power does not satiate their desire. The total dominance those in power seek is but a prelude to their true ambition: universal annihilation, pure death, a razing of all human endeavour, a return to zero that ends in the blink of an eye.
But if the old proverb is right, and the Devil’s first attribute is cowardice, then it should come as no surprise that these men wield fear like the walking stick of a dying king, a blunt ashplant used by a sick man to bludgeon all those who stand in his way. wild eyes and feeble mind be damned.
If we are ever to divert from our current path of misery and all-out destruction, to escape this track of bare bones, laid out by ghosts and nailed to the earth with bits of old chain, then we alone must shift the momentum. A world unamenable to the basic truths of justice and human dignity is one hostile to all life, including your own.
As I write, "ICE/CBP agents [are] beating and abducting peaceful protestors" at a detention center in Minnesota.
If we ever wake up to find ourselves in a better world, it will be because we made good on a debt we owe to Renee, to her memory, one to never forget her life and what happened on January 7th, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It will be because we honored the memories of every family ripped apart, imprisoned, exiled, and killed under racist pretenses. It will be because we honored the memories of the victims of the genocide in Gaza. It will be because we honored the memories of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland, Heather Heyer, and the countless other victims of senseless, institutionalized violence, casualties of an insatiable death-machine, one fueled by the snuffed-out joy of others, fossilized and harvested from belowground.
But we the living continue to walk the surface, and for the sake of those unable, even in the face of unprecedented horror, must never turn away from our commitment to joy, to life, to the day when that toxic fog dissipates by the inescapable heat of the sun, in the light of tomorrow, not the darkness of yesterday.
R.I.P. Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother of three.