- Feb 5, 2002
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Renee Good has become a Rorschach test.
Like the rest of the country, I have strong opinions about what happened last week. And like everyone else, I am finding that expressing those opinions does very little beyond confirming existing biases or costing people readers and friends.
We tend to see what we want to see. All of us. We are deeply vulnerable to the temptation to believe we alone have a monopoly on objectivity and clear-headedness. And we are almost always wrong about that.
For many of my feminist friends, Renee Good is a martyr. A victim of femicide. A woman trying to make a difference in her community, who paid the ultimate price when a hot-headed man with a gun decided to punish her for defying him.
For many of my MAGA friends, she is a cautionary tale about the woke mind virus. A woman so poisoned by hysterical ideology that she felt justified in obstructing law enforcement and endangering the lives of the men tasked with removing criminal sex offenders from her community. “She tried to kill a law enforcement officer,” they say. “It is sad, but she brought it on herself.”
I fall somewhere center right on this, not that it ultimately matters. For what it is worth, I do not think Renee Good woke up that day intending to kill a law enforcement officer. I think she made bad choices, tried to flee, and made a catastrophic decision that cost her her life. When someone is in the middle of committing multiple felonies, the likelihood of something going terribly wrong increases dramatically. Wisdom encourages de-escalation and risk mitigation, not escalation.
Continued below.
kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com
Like the rest of the country, I have strong opinions about what happened last week. And like everyone else, I am finding that expressing those opinions does very little beyond confirming existing biases or costing people readers and friends.
We tend to see what we want to see. All of us. We are deeply vulnerable to the temptation to believe we alone have a monopoly on objectivity and clear-headedness. And we are almost always wrong about that.
For many of my feminist friends, Renee Good is a martyr. A victim of femicide. A woman trying to make a difference in her community, who paid the ultimate price when a hot-headed man with a gun decided to punish her for defying him.
For many of my MAGA friends, she is a cautionary tale about the woke mind virus. A woman so poisoned by hysterical ideology that she felt justified in obstructing law enforcement and endangering the lives of the men tasked with removing criminal sex offenders from her community. “She tried to kill a law enforcement officer,” they say. “It is sad, but she brought it on herself.”
I fall somewhere center right on this, not that it ultimately matters. For what it is worth, I do not think Renee Good woke up that day intending to kill a law enforcement officer. I think she made bad choices, tried to flee, and made a catastrophic decision that cost her her life. When someone is in the middle of committing multiple felonies, the likelihood of something going terribly wrong increases dramatically. Wisdom encourages de-escalation and risk mitigation, not escalation.
Continued below.
Renee Good, ICE, and the Politics of Selective Outrage
Renee Good has become a Rorschach test.
kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com
