Warped reality

I’ll bet there were rogue Skittles on the floor of Renee’s and Becca’s SUV, probably some smashed French fries under the mats. I’ll bet there were mysterious sticky stains on the seats, too. You just can’t keep a vehicle clean if you have kids. And then there’s that dog.

I need to write about this tragedy.

I need to write about the normalness of a mom at the wheel of an SUV with a dog in the backseat, the one-sided aggression from federal agents, Renee’s friendly acknowledgement, gunfire, the SUV rolling head-on into a utility pole in such a deeply unsettling way that we knew the worst of what we feared had happened.

Renee was dying for eight minutes while ICE agents watched and refused to help, ordering those coming to her aid to stay back.

I need to write about the glimpse into the SUV after the murder, the revelation of ordinary domestic detritus—exactly what you’d expect to see in a mother’s vehicle—through an open passenger-side door juxtaposed against yellow police tape and a blood-splattered headrest.

I need to write about how, in that image, my eyes were drawn to the stuffed animals poking out of the glovebox. There was a unicorn and what looked like a Teddy bear.

I think about how my granddaughters love unicorns, about how I’ve nicknamed my youngest grandson Squishy Bear because he’s still in that squishy stage, and his first name is Arthur, which means “bear.” I think about my sandy-blonde, 30-year-old daughter, the mother of my four grandkids. I think about how that could be the glovebox in Madison’s minivan.

I think about my daughter Mackenzie. I think about my wife Christine. I think about how, in the same situation, the three women I know best would likely say a lot of things to an ICE agent, masked and menacing, and that “It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you” would be the furthest from any of it. I fantasize about how their ferocity might have even saved them in a similar situation; that their in-your-face defiance might have somehow altered his decision to shoot three times, twice through the driver’s side window.

Because nice and polite sure didn’t matter.

Because reasonableness didn’t matter.

Because goodness did not matter.

Because a man with a hammer believes everything is a nail.

And when you give a man like that a federal badge, a gun, permission to brutalize, and indulge his deluded sense of righteous entitlement? Well, we all knew this was an inevitable outcome. We all knew people would die. We all knew it back in January of last year.

I need to write about how so many of us carried on with our daily lies afterward, how some of us went on as if it were just another Wednesday.

I need to write about the surrealism of making a grocery list, checking the bank balance, filling the truck with gas, and making dinner, overlaid with the gut-churning reality of a state-sanctioned murder we all witnessed, the despicable slanders about Renee spewing from the lips of our leaders, the utter insanity of it all.

I need to write about the absolute heinousness of this, to dig into the twisted ideology that molded a murderer, to treat it like the anomaly it should be, the thing that demands deep inspection and justice. But Renee’s murder is old news now, not blasé, but not headline stuff.

New atrocities arise like a pox sweeping the land every single damn day, and I can’t keep up.

I need to write about how 2025 was the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004, with 32 deaths and six more deaths as of mid-January 2026. I need to write about how, darker still, reported numbers likely don’t reflect the truth, about how ICE sometimes “releases” individuals from custody shortly before they die—people who are hospitalized and sometimes in comas—which allows the agency to avoid counting those deaths in official reports.

But even this is old news now, and I can’t keep up.

For god’s sake, we watched the bastards hold down and mace a person in the face.

Yesterday morning, they apprehended a five-year-old boy.

My other grandson, Henry, is five years old.

How do you even…

I can’t comprehend it. I can’t abide it.

As I wonder who will be next, wonder what I will do when the wicked comes to our community, wonder how I’ll really react when the stormtroopers disappear our neighbors, wonder what I’ll do if they bust down my front door, wonder when we’ll collectively say enough—more people are hurt, more people are killed, more evil exacted on those most vulnerable.

And the most horrid realization is that it is our collective fault. Too many times we turned a blind eye, or thought the risk too great, or just flat didn’t care because maybe it didn’t directly affect us or affect people we care about. And now the consequences come calling—carrying assault rifles, tear gas, and cloaked in the bullshit guise of “law and order.”

All for the appeasement of a failing man.

We’ve given power to a weak man posing as strong behind a fortress of money and a web of extortion, a man with an ego of planetary proportions yet fragile as a soap bubble, a man whose insecurities aren’t even secret—a man who wallows in them, shares them without shame for all the world to see.

We’ve given power to a man who feeds his abominable appetites with the souls of the innocent, who believes power has the right to overcome autonomy, who seeks to crush and dominate anyone who dares challenge his inflated notion of entitlement. And as he sinks ever deeper into the dark core of his inadequacy, his fear of exposure, his intellectual impotence, he becomes a black hole, the world caught up in his gravity—the swirling vortex of a pathological thirst for supremacy and an ideological commitment to cruelty.

We are all sucked into the maw of corruption, narcissism, and hate, a warped reality manifesting just beyond this monster’s event horizon.