\n<\/p>\n
By<\/span> now,<\/span> many<\/span> of us have seen the horrifying footage out of Minneapolis this past week, of an ICE officer fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good, <\/span>a 37-year-old mother<\/span> 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 \u2014 regardless of their political stance \u2014 would agree that the killing was unwarranted and cruel.<\/span><\/p>\n I was wrong. Before an investigation was even conducted, members of the Trump administration rushed to call Good a \u201cdomestic terrorist\u201d who was attempting to run over ICE agents with her car. It\u2019s a theory that a frame-by-frame <\/span>analysis from The New York Times<\/span> debunked. <\/span> <\/p>\n 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 <\/span>and even while just interacting with people in real life<\/span>, aware that what I considered an objective act of <\/span>unnecessary violence<\/span> seemed to be up for ethical debate for others.<\/span> Forget about where we all stand politically \u2014 didn\u2019t we all see the same thing on that video?<\/span> <\/p>\n This jarring moral dissonance feels extraordinarily prevalent now,<\/span> even though I know all too well that anti-immigrant sentiment underlies so much of America\u2019s histor<\/span>y. It feels harder to anticipate what people\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n To be clear, my fatigue has nothing to do with differing values. I do not believe that everyone\u2019s values should align with mine.<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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<\/span>-day life \u2014 constantly bracing myself to receive an anti-human response from someone about a basic injustice \u2014 is exhausting<\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n My friends and I call it \u201cfriend or foe\u201d fatigue, or that uneasy feeling of no longer knowing what our culture\u2019s core values are and having to live in hypervigilance because we aren\u2019t sure who is fundamentally against our right to live freely as queer, Black or immigrant Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n This week isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve felt \u201cfriend or foe\u201d 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 \u2014 <\/span>including a U.N. commission<\/span> \u2014 and the responses I\u2019ve 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. <\/span>doxed<\/span> online. <\/span><\/p>\n I also think about how, just a few years ago, most Americans agreed that <\/span>separating children from their parents<\/span> at the border was objectively wrong. Now, we can\u2019t even seem to agree whether sending ICE into American cities and killing American citizens is morally unjust.<\/span><\/p>\n To be clear, my fatigue has nothing to do with differing values. I do not believe that everyone\u2019s values should align with mine. Not everyone who disagrees with me is a \u201cfoe,\u201d by any means. <\/span><\/p>\n But having differing opinions on how to run the economy, for example, is very different than debating whether a protester deserves to die. <\/span><\/p>\n I ache for a consensus about things that we all learned in kindergarten are objectively inhumane or unjust: <\/span>blocking aid<\/span> to a starving population is objectively cruel, as is <\/span>law enforcement killing an unarmed civilian<\/span> and politicians blocking trans Americans from <\/span>accessing life-affirming health care<\/span>. Perhaps our black-and-white political echo chambers make it impossible to access empathy when the wrongs being committed are against those we\u2019re convinced are our political enemies.<\/span><\/p>\n And so, it feels tiring to hear anyone IRL, in the comment sections, \u201cplay devil\u2019s advocate,\u201d or someone from an <\/span>unparalleled place of power<\/span> brazenly explain away the life of an innocent woman. Maybe conservatives feel this \u201cfriend or foe\u201d fatigue as well. I wonder if they brace themselves when reading comments and engaging with the news. <\/span> <\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019t seem to grasp. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[12877,376,638,1492,7731],"class_list":{"0":"post-41229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-circumstances","9":"tag-death","10":"tag-debate","11":"tag-goods","12":"tag-renee"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}