Murdered VA Nurse, Alex Pretti. Image: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Wiki Commons
Murdered VA Nurse, Alex Pretti. Image: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Wiki Commons
It’s not enough to grieve the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; we must defend their memories. We must not allow them to be slandered, mischaracterized, and dehumanized.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
It is as tragic and frightening as any day in my lifetime:
The complete disregard for his life by those thugs cosplaying as soldiers is beyond comprehension.
The utter contempt for his memory by this Administration is unrepentantly evil.
And what soon followed by supposedly patriotic, Jesus-following Conservative Americans is sadly predictable.
Like you, I’m finding words difficult for the waste of it all, the sickening deja vu of what’s unfolded, and the feeling that we’re slipping into something more dark than our minds can fathom.
One of the saddest things about today is that I can imagine the conversations right now by my former friends, distant family members, neighbors, and people I used to pastor:
“Oh, he was threatening them!”
“He came at them with a gun. They were just defending themselves.”
“He was another Leftist extremist!”
“That’s what you get when you attack officers.”
This is the mass delusion being curated again.
They will believe Trump and Noem and Patel and Bondi and Leavitt, and not their own eyes.
They will convince themselves that the truth is not the truth, because otherwise they will need to come to terms with the reality that they are complicit in this, that they have created this monster, that they have failed their nation and their faith, that everything we’ve warned them about for ten years is now here.
To avoid accountability, and the courage and change that would require of them, they will willfully choose a comfortable fiction; a fantasy that declares them patriotic and righteous, and anyone whose presence disturbs that story, the enemy.
And they will dig in their heels, double down, and descend further into cultic tribalism while trying to bury the cognitive dissonance they have created.
Actual, real, walking-around, business-owning, church-going, school board-attending Americans will choose to vilify slaughtered human beings instead of admitting they were wrong.
And they will look at the decent people across this nation, those with a conscience, those who refuse to deny reality, and they will say that we are the problem.
They will dehumanize us to the point that when we are beaten or kidnapped or executed, it will not elicit anything but the belief that we got what we deserved.
This is what Trump has done to a sizable portion of this nation, and it’s something the rest of us need to face with sober, unflinching clarity.
It’s not enough to grieve the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; we must defend their memories.
We must not allow them to be slandered, mischaracterized, and dehumanized.
We must walk into our days and into every space in which we find ourselves, and we must speak truth about what is happening.
That is our responsibility as good people bearing witness to violence, just as they did.
This is the statement from Alex Pretti’s distraught family:
ICE killed him.
The Trump Administration slandered him.
Conservative Americans have joined them.
This has happened to Alex Pretti and his family.
It happened to Renee Good and her family.
It will happen to thousands and thousands of families, unless we decide that we not tolerate it another day.
I know you’d like me to tell you what you should do in response, but I’m unable to.
I’m still working through what my response will be.
These are matters of conscience, and they cannot be made from a distance, but within the cavernous places of our own hearts.
I can only tell you that we are all tethered together, that every one of us has a life to leverage, and that we will rise or fall together.
May we meet this moment with the best of ourselves.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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