One of the hardest tasks we face collectively is identifying the moment when we have passed a point of no return. It isn't a question of simply identifying the crises. These are clear and plenty. The question is: when have we shifted into a form no longer recognizable to ourselves?

In the span of one week, we have watched more of the unthinkable unfold, earthshattering moments piling up. It is only a week into a new year, yet we are already exhausted by 2026. The US government abducted the president and first lady of Venezuela in violation of every norm established through the UN to hold our fragile world together. Trump has reached beyond the bounds of international law with such brazen contempt that even the pretense of world order has shattered.

And in that same week, on a snowy Minnesota morning, an ICE agent, later identified as Jonathan E. Ross, emboldened by this brutal administration shot Renee Nicole Good through her car window. He shot her through the front windshield. As she slumped forward, he shot her again and again through the side window. He murdered her. And then his fellow ICE officers stood by as she died. They prevented a physician who rushed to help from providing emergency care, when the physician asked if he could check for a pulse, ICE agents refused and said “I don’t care" as Renee bled out.

This Is Who We Are Now

Renee had dropped her children off at school that morning. She drove with her partner and their dog to be a legal observer, to ensure there would be witnesses to the illegal acts happening around our country. She drove toward the vulnerable, members of her community who were being targeted by masked thugs, to make sure they were not alone. And she was murdered for it.

We will organize. We will refuse. We will not fund our own terror.

The ICE officers near her did nothing to try to revive her. Nothing to keep her alive. They barred those around her from helping. The shooter simply walked away, gazed at his phone flippantly, got in a car, and drove off.

So who are we? Are we Renee Good, whose children's toys were squeezed into every crevice of her car, who understood that when neighbors are under attack, showing up to bear witness is not optional, rather, it is our obligation? Or are we the masked agent who carelessly takes a gun and shoots an unarmed witness in the head?

The Architecture of Exclusion

What we are witnessing is what social psychologist Morton Deutsch called moral exclusion—the process by which we come to see more and more people as undeserving of rights, as outside the sphere of justice. When people are morally excluded, their mistreatment becomes justifiable. Their discrimination becomes policy. Their exploitation becomes economic strategy. Their murder becomes enforcement.

The ICE agents who killed Renee and prevented anyone from saving her life had excluded her from their moral community. She was not a mother to three children. Not a neighbor. Not a beloved partner and precious daughter to her mom and dad. Not a person worthy of life-saving intervention. She was disposable.

This is not new in America. We have always had these ebbs and flows, moments when fascistic violence surges and moments when it recedes just enough for us to pretend it's over. For the majority of this country's history, Black and brown people were morally excluded by white people. And white people learned to accept this. We became numb to it. Look at who fills our prisons: the majority are Black and brown people. We have been complicit in building and funding a system that treats Black and brown lives as disposable. We pay our taxes knowing where they go. We see the incarceration rates and do nothing.

The moral universe in the eyes of the state has always been small. What is happening now is that it is shrinking further, faster. The violence we accepted against Black and brown communities is expanding.

© Common Dreams