Viola Luzzo, Heather Heyer and Renee Good: Three Ordinary Women Killed Because They Were Like Us

ByToby Sackton

An ICE agent in Minneapolis today shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a defenseless 37-year-old mother of a six-year-old, who lived with her partner in Minneapolis. Good was a legal observer who, based on videos, stopped her car when ICE vehicles blocked the street she was driving on. Then, another ICE vehicle, a truck with flashing lights, came up behind her car. Agents swarmed out and tried to open her door. Terrified, Good tried to leave when one agent pulled a gun and shot her in the face multiple times, killing her. Her wife was left sobbing in on the sidewalk.

ICE agents did not allow a doctor who was on the scene to try to treat Good, and when the paramedics came they would not allow them drive to her but forced them to carry her out to the ambulance. She was dead.

This brutal, deadly violence was directed against an innocent woman who in many ways was just like many of us. She attended anti-ICE rallies. She felt keenly the injustice of masked federal agents terrorizing immigrants for political gain, and so she volunteered as a witness, just as many of us have become trained LUCE verifiers.

I am stunned and torn apart tonight because this is a wound not just to Minneapolis, but to the nation. How have we allowed such corrupt hunger for power, such hatred and entitled cruelty to metastasize into an evil that allows a masked federal thug to causally kill an ordinary American on her familiar city street. An evil that allows Kristi Noem to justify hunting of such victims by calling them terrorists? I would like to see Nuremberg trials for Krisi Noem, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

They are conscience-free perpetrators of violence, as inhuman as the leaders who could conceive of the death camps in Germany, or the genocide in Rwanda, or the massacres of Bosnians in Serbia.

But that is not going to happen soon. Renee Good is a martyr every bit as much as Viola Luzzo, the Detroit mother killed by white supremacists in Alabama after giving rides to some of the marchers from Selma to Montgomery. She is as much a martyr as Heather Daneille Heyer, killed in Charlotte n 2017 when an angry rightwing thug drove into a crowd of non-violent protestors.

Each of these women believed in helping others, they believed in non-violence, and they believed, as Heather Heyer said in her last Facebook post before her death, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. These women paid attention.

And so do we. There will be a Justice for All Bearing Witness weekly Thursday demonstration outside of ICE in Burlington tomorrow 11:00 a.m to 12:30 p.m. There is also a call for a rally in memory of Renee Good tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. at the Waltham Common. Leaders of Indivisible are also discussing a response.

Our movement to protect our communities is non-violent, and the more state terror and violence is used against us, the more those perpetrating it are losing. Our strength is our community and sticking with each other, even in the face of deep fear. We need to know, like the leaders of Bearing Witness and the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights leaders, that we will overcome our fear together and grow stronger. ICE agents may look tough and threatening; but one day justice will come, and those who crossed the line into supporting state terror and violence will be prosecuted, just as Illinois Governor Pritzker has said.

We don’t want a martyr in Massachusetts, and our legislature and leadership must recognize the serious threat that ill-trained ICE agents recruited via violent war movies and videogames represent. They must take steps to protect us.

 

[ed. note:  our headline for this story does not mean to downplay the shootings of people who face risk everyday because of racism.  Instead we wanted to convey the universality of the hatred and danger ICE poses to everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, regardless of race. If you oppose them they think of you as less than human, someone they can kill without compunction.  This is the classic fascist framing of all enemies as sub-human who get what they deserve.  The headline was an attempt to convey this truth.]

 

Similar Posts

  • |

    In an Emergency, Break Glass

    ByToby Sackton

    Imagine this scenario after November 3rd. Democrats have exceeded expectations and seem to be on the verge of winning 52 seats in the Senate, after taking the house with a substantial majority. But it is November 5th, and Michigan’s county canvass has just begun, with El-Sayed ahead by only a few thousand ballots and a recount looming.

    Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman, known to be erratic, announces that he is switching parties and becoming a Republican as he will not be in the same party as El-Sayed. Then Mike Rogers, the losing Republican Candidate, calls on the Justice Department to seize ballots in Detroit, on the false grounds of massive dysfunction in the voting machine tabulation of paper ballots. With a preplanned strike that night, federal agents seize the sealed ballot containers held by the Detroit clerk for the canvass. When an injunction overturns their action on Nov. 6th, as many as 15,000 paper ballots appear to have gone missing, about 30% of the absentee ballots they took.

  • Come to A Reverse Tea Party at Town’s Dec. 13th Tea Burning Reenactment

    ByChristine Dall

    Learn your local resistance history and celebrate modern patriotic resistance while having fun and doing good work at Lexington’s Annual Reenactment of the town’s historic Dec. 13, 1773 Tea Burning. The Lexington Visitor’s Center, Lexington Historical Society and the Lexington Minute Men invite all to participate in activities beginning at 10:00 a.m. at the Visitor’s Center.

    There’ll be recreations of a soldier encampment, musket drills,18th-century cooking demonstrations, parades and music, all culminating in the burning of tea at 1:30 p.m.

    Lexington Alarm!’s Reverse Tea Party fundraising event to support local food banks will be happening from 12:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. We will be in Depot Square…

  • 2 Ice Planes Land Same Day at Hanscom

    ByToby Sackton

    When Hanscom Airfield was first taken over by Massport, there was immense community opposition in Lexington, Concord, and surrounding towns because people did not want a major second Boston airport, as the infrastructure to support it was non-existent and it also would have changed the character of the Minuteman National Park, nearly an abutter.

    The result was a compromise for a small regional airfield, where jets of more than 60 seats would not be allowed. This agreement, limiting commercial airlines to 60 seats, was codified into law in the act enabling Massport to acquire the airport in 1980. The FAA sued, saying that FAA rules preempted local airport authorities from restricting operations in this way. Massachusetts won.

  • ICE Raids Tearing Apart Social Fabric of Massachusetts

    ByToby Sackton

    ICE raids are tearing apart the social fabric of our State. Each person deported has a family or other ties such as a job or community, and ICE is deliberately trying to force self-deportation, even of citizens, if they were born elsewhere.

    Here is a recent story. ICE agents stayed for one week at the Holiday Inn in Marlborough…