What These Moments Are Doing to Us (that we're mostly unaware of) - A different take on the Renee Good Shooting

A reflection on violence, narrative, and the vulnerable work of staying human

Mostly I haven’t engaged these kinds of stories as they often feel like a lose/lose proposition.

I’ve so rarely felt that such engagement results in what I might call a net good.

And, I notice precious little of the kind of expression and dialogue that could take something positive and beneficial from events such as these.

So… I wade in.

And I do so with sincerely good intentions and with the desire to become more expressed, connected and informed by doing so.

As I’m sure most of you have seen, recently, footage circulated of a woman, Renee Good, being shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Almost immediately, the familiar pattern followed.

The same video was watched by millions of people, and from it emerged radically different conclusions. Some saw an unjust killing. Others saw an inevitable outcome of deliberate interference with law enforcement. Still others focused on procedure, legality, or personal responsibility.

What’s striking is not simply that people disagreed.

Disagreement is not new.

What’s striking is how quickly certainty hardened, how rapidly the event was absorbed into pre-existing narratives, and how little room remained for complexity, grief, or curiosity once those narratives took hold.

This has become the water we are swimming in.

And much like fish, most are helplessly unaware that that is the case.

We live in a world where nearly everything that happens can be captured, edited, framed, and distributed within minutes.

It seems most everything is.

The technology itself is neutral. The incentives shaping how it’s used, most certainly are not.

Content that provokes outrage, fear, or moral superiority spreads faster than content that invites nuance and inquiry.

Stories that polarize outperform stories that humanize. The result is not just misinformation, but a steady erosion of trust and our capacity to stay present with complexity and curious about it.

It’s also painfully obvious that these stories are not shaped and manicured without a kind of twisted logic.

These stories are, more often than not, used as smoke screens and distractions from where the powers that be don’t want us to look.

None of this means the events don't matter.

In this case, a woman has lost her life. And she has done so, in my estimation, unnecessarily.

That is real.

That is consequential.

That deserves gravity.

But gravity is not the same as certainty, and care is not the same as choosing a side and closing the case.

What often goes missing in moments like this is the space to actually feel what we’re witnessing before deciding what it means.

To use the triggers and unhealed wounds that the situation touches in us as a catalyst for more healing and integration of our own unresolved stuff.

There is evidence that Renee Good was actively interfering with federal agents. There is also evidence of trauma, on both sides of the interaction. There is very good reason to believe the agent involved was carrying unresolved physiological and psychological residue from a prior violent incident involving a motor vehicle.

To pretend that history, stress, and nervous system activation played no role in how judgment and behavior unfolded would be naive.

At the same time, acknowledging complexity is not the same as excusing harm. It is simply a refusal to reduce a lethal, irreversible moment into a single moral headline.

What concerns me most is not which interpretation ultimately prevails, but what happens to us as we engage these events the way we currently do.

Because something subtle and corrosive is happening.

We are being trained to react before we feel.

To argue before we listen.

To defend an ideology before we can encounter another human being.

Every event becomes a test of allegiance.

Every conversation becomes a proxy war.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we lose the muscle required to hold tension without converting it into false certainty.

This is where the deeper opportunity lives, if we’re willing to take it.

Not the opportunity to be right, but the opportunity to remain human with other humans in the presence of things that are disturbing, tragic, and unresolved.

That begins with allowing ourselves to notice our own reactions before projecting them outward.

The tightening in the chest.

The surge of anger or righteousness.

The urge to simplify staggering complexity.

These reactions don’t make us bad people. They make us human. But when we don’t take responsibility for them, they run the conversation instead of informing it.

From there, the invitation widens.

Can we speak what genuinely matters to us without erasing what matters to someone else?

Can we create space for another person’s reality without collapsing our own?

Can we acknowledge that two people can be responding to different truths inside the same event, without concluding that one of them must be irredeemable?

This is not about passivity. It is not about moral relativism. It is about recognizing that how we engage with one another around these events is shaping the world we are collectively living in.

When conversations leave everyone more entrenched, more dehumanized, and more convinced that violence is inevitable, we should pause and ask whether something essential has been missed.

The long arc of change has never been driven by perfect analysis alone. Or getting any one event ‘right’.

It has been driven by people who could stay present with pain without turning it into permission to degrade or destroy one another.

These moments are not just tests of policy or ideology. They are tests of willingness.

Willingness to feel without collapsing.

Willingness to speak without annihilating.

Willingness to listen without surrendering one’s values.

If we are going to say anything about events like this at all, perhaps the most important thing we can say is this: the way we engage them matters. Not just for this moment, but for the kind of society we are rehearsing into existence.

Horrific events will keep occurring.

The footage will keep coming. The narratives will keep multiplying. The pressure to choose a side will not ease.

The question is whether we will keep outsourcing our humanity to outrage, or whether we will learn how to stay in the room with one another long enough to remember what’s actually at stake.

Not just who was right.

But, for better or worse, who we are becoming.

With care and consideration,

- Dolphin

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