Another watershed moment
Just some facts, after the killing of yet another American civilian.
Issue #103
Hi all —
What happened this weekend in Minnesota goes beyond Brown, Black or white. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz framed what’s happening as not a political debate anymore, but a moral one.
Here are a list of facts (as of Monday morning). Not opinion. Just facts about American officials killing a fellow American — again.
As an American, Alex Pretti chose to exercise his rights and record the actions of public servants on public streets on Saturday.
Federal ICE agents fatally shot Pretti — an ICU nurse who worked at the VA helping American veterans — with multiple bullets on a Minneapolis street.
Pretti was a U.S. citizen and 37 years old.
Pretti was legally carrying a gun, under Minnesota state law.
Pretti did not have a criminal record and only had a few traffic tickets in the past.
Official federal government accounts of what happened on Saturday don’t line up with multiple angles of bystander video that captured the incident.
He lived in a country that had been founded 250 years ago on ideals of free expression and decentralized power through states’ rights, after the founding fathers had declared King George III a tyrant for impeding the rights of the colonies thousands of miles away.
The federal government has been sending surges of ICE immigration enforcement, even as Minnesota state and local officials prefer a different approach. Walz has called on the president to end the current efforts and shift to “humane, focused, effective immigration control” instead. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said: “How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end? How many more lives need to be lost before this administration realizes that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values?”
It’s often easy to abstract what’s happening in a different part of the country or world as something distant. But I’ve been considering this thought exercise:
Swap Minneapolis for <INSERT ANY CITY>.
And now swap Alex Pretti for <your cousin>.
<Your friend>.
<Your spouse>.
<You>.
Growing up in the U.S., many of us were continually taught messages of empathy in our public schools, about how to love thy neighbor and treat others like you want to be treated — all in a country that regularly emphasized it was the epitome of freedom and refuge for anyone who wanted a better life.
Every single morning of elementary school, our right hands over our hearts, teachers led a pledge of allegiance to a flag for a nation “with liberty and justice for all.”
I increasingly wonder how many of us can look honestly at the next generation of children, directly in their eyes, and tell them that grown-ups practice what they preach — and are fully telling the truth.
—Vignesh
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