By now, many of us have seen the horrifying footage out of Minneapolis this past week, of an ICE officer fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother who appeared to be turning her car away from him. To me and many others, that video is an unambiguous example of law enforcement using excessive force on an American citizen. After watching it multiple times, I thought that, surely, anyone who also saw it — regardless of their political stance — would agree that the killing was unwarranted and cruel.
I was wrong. Before an investigation was even conducted, members of the Trump administration rushed to call Good a “domestic terrorist” who was attempting to run over ICE agents with her car. It’s a theory that a frame-by-frame analysis from The New York Times debunked.
We all watched the same video, but apparently saw different things, which is disconcerting. Some people online even made horrible AI videos and images making fun of Good that are too disturbing to describe or link to. All week since the shooting, I have been anxious and hypervigilant on social media and even while just interacting with people in real life, aware that what I considered an objective act of unnecessary violence seemed to be up for ethical debate for others. Forget about where we all stand politically — didn’t we all see the same thing on that video?
This jarring moral dissonance feels extraordinarily prevalent now, even though I know all too well that anti-immigrant sentiment underlies so much of America’s history. It feels harder to anticipate what people’s stances will be when discussing the news or reading comments, and sometimes the opinions of people I know personally have shocked me to my core.
To be clear, my fatigue has nothing to do with differing values. I do not believe that everyone’s values should align with mine.
We’re no longer debating specific policies; there instead appear to be gaps in our understanding of basic human rights and the fundamental value of human life. And encountering this reality in my day-to-day life — constantly bracing myself to receive an anti-human response from someone about a basic injustice — is exhausting.
My friends and I call it “friend or foe” fatigue, or that uneasy feeling of no longer knowing what our culture’s core values are and having to live in hypervigilance because we aren’t sure who is fundamentally against our right to live freely as queer, Black or immigrant Americans.
This week isn’t the first time I’ve felt “friend or foe” fatigue. During the last few years, I have chosen to vocalize my concerns about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which has been deemed a genocide by international institutions — including a U.N. commission — and the responses I’ve gotten have been jarring. Regardless of where you stand on the conflict, it feels fair to agree that children should not have to starve to death anywhere, ever. Yet pointing this out has gotten people in the U.S. doxed online.
I also think about how, just a few years ago, most Americans agreed that separating children from their parents at the border was objectively wrong. Now, we can’t even seem to agree whether sending ICE into American cities and killing American citizens is morally unjust.
To be clear, my fatigue has nothing to do with differing values. I do not believe that everyone’s values should align with mine. Not everyone who disagrees with me is a “foe,” by any means.
But having differing opinions on how to run the economy, for example, is very different than debating whether a protester deserves to die.
I ache for a consensus about things that we all learned in kindergarten are objectively inhumane or unjust: blocking aid to a starving population is objectively cruel, as is law enforcement killing an unarmed civilian and politicians blocking trans Americans from accessing life-affirming health care. Perhaps our black-and-white political echo chambers make it impossible to access empathy when the wrongs being committed are against those we’re convinced are our political enemies.
And so, it feels tiring to hear anyone IRL, in the comment sections, “play devil’s advocate,” or someone from an unparalleled place of power brazenly explain away the life of an innocent woman. Maybe conservatives feel this “friend or foe” fatigue as well. I wonder if they brace themselves when reading comments and engaging with the news.
It’s hard to find that type of empathy from where I stand, as I watch the rest of the world expressing their horror at what is happening in the U.S. with a clarity that we can’t seem to grasp.
