Low diatribe

I spent the last half of the 90s in Minneapolis. I lived two blocks from the corner of 26th St and Nicollet Ave.

If that intersection sounds familiar, it's where Alex Jeffrey Pretti was pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground, then beaten by six masked ICE agents, then shot to death. All of this in front of dozens of witnesses, several of them capturing the entire altercation on video.

This happened today, January 24, 2026. Twenty-five years after I moved away.

In 2001 remote work was practically unheard of, and I left Minneapolis for Silicon Valley to follow my career path. I've lived in multiple places since, ultimately choosing country living. I've built careers, relationships, entire chapters of life that have nothing to do with those Twin City streets, but Minneapolis will always hold a special place in my heart.

I can still walk those two blocks in my mind. The route to the corner store, the sound of traffic on that street, the way light hit the buildings in late afternoon. I haven't lived there in 25 years, but the geography is still mapped in my body.

When violence happens in a place you used to inhabit, it collapses time. The news says "Minneapolis" and my brain supplies the specific intersection, the specific distance, the specific texture of that neighborhood. It's not abstract. It's the place I bought milk.

Dozens of people saw it happen. Several recorded it. In 2026, we have the technology to capture irrefutable proof. Everyone has a camera. Everything can be recorded. But the psychological cost of seeing and documenting violence — we're still learning how to carry that.

The witnesses aren't just evidence. They're people who now have to live with what they saw.

And it's our burden to share that burden. Not to take it from them — we can't. But to refuse to let them carry it alone. To witness their witnessing. To insist that what they documented matters, that their courage matters, that their trauma matters.

When we look away, witnesses carry the full weight alone. When we engage, when we refuse denial, when we insist on accountability — we distribute the load. We say: you saw something real, and we see it too. We see you.

This isn't the first time this kind of violence has happened. It's the most recent and most public time.

When I was little I was taught to believe what I saw and heard. For the longest time, information only came from newspapers or television — both carefully constructed outlets that showed what they chose to show.

I was 19 when the news finally dropped a glimmer of the reality of institutional violence. Rodney King, beaten by Los Angeles police officers while George Holliday's camera captured it from his apartment balcony. That grainy video changed something. Not everything — the officers were acquitted, the city burned — but something. It cracked open the possibility that what we'd been told about authority and protection might not match what was actually happening.

The era of peace and safety I'd been raised to believe in was a carefully cultivated front that shielded some of us from what others experienced daily. The violence was always there. It just wasn't being shown to people who looked like me.

People from historically excluded groups had been warning us about these things for generations. They were systematically silenced, dismissed, erased. The video didn't reveal new violence — it revealed violence that had always been happening to communities who'd been trying to tell us.

That was 1991. Thirty-five years ago. And we're still here.

Multiple videos. Multiple angles. Dozens of witnesses.

They all add up to tell one consistent story. The administration's account doesn't match the evidence.

This is the gap that breaks trust in institutions. Not just the violence, but the refusal to acknowledge what's visible. The insistence that what we can all see didn't happen the way we saw it.

Orwell wrote: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

When institutions deny facts, they're not just contesting a narrative. They're demanding that we reject what we can see. They're declaring that truth is negotiable, that evidence is optional, that power determines reality.

This is how authority becomes illegitimate. Not through the act of violence, but through the refusal to acknowledge its existence.

Six masked agents. Multiple videos. A person dead on a Minneapolis street I used to walk.

I've spent years exploring what legitimate authority looks like. What it means to lead without hiding. What it takes to build trust instead of demanding it. Watching this unfold two blocks from where I used to live makes the contrast impossible to ignore.

Legitimate authority doesn't wear masks. It doesn't hide behind anonymity or institutional protection. It stands visible, accountable, willing to be identified and questioned.

Legitimate authority doesn't deny what's documented. It acknowledges hard truths, even when they're uncomfortable. Especially when they're uncomfortable. Because trust isn't built through denial — it's built through the willingness to face what's real.

Legitimate authority doesn't require intimidation or violence to maintain itself. It earns respect through consistency, through accountability, through the daily practice of doing what it says it will do.

The masks tell you everything. When authority hides its face, it knows it's doing something it can't defend in daylight.

The violence happened today. In a place I left 25 years ago. In a neighborhood that was home but isn't anymore.

Time collapses. I'm simultaneously here — hundreds of miles away, decades removed — and there, two blocks from where I used to sleep.

The place exists in two states. It's the Minneapolis I knew in the 90s, and it's the Minneapolis where this happened today. Both are real. Both exist in my mind simultaneously.

I can't go back to the place I knew because it doesn't exist anymore — violence has rewritten it. The intersection is the same, but it means something different now.

This is what violence does to place: it overwrites memory with trauma. The street I walked becomes the street where Alex was killed. Both are true. Both exist.

I keep asking myself: what do we do when we witness injustice? When we see authority fail? When the place we love becomes the site of violence we can't undo?

I'm learning to carry it. Not as burden alone, but as responsibility.

To name what happened. To refuse denial. To insist that documented reality matters, that truth isn't negotiable, and accountability isn't optional.

To remember that proximity doesn't expire and that distance doesn't absolve us.

I'm practicing building the kind of authority I want to see: visible, accountable, willing to face hard truths. Leading without masks. Acknowledging what's real, even when it's uncomfortable. Creating environments where people don't have to fear the very systems meant to protect them.

This is the work. Not spectacular. Not polished. Just the daily practice of refusing to look away, of carrying difficult truths, of building trust through consistency and accountability.

The dissonance is permanent. Places are rewritten. People are gone.

Alex Pretti is gone. Renée Good is gone.

They are the two most visibly documented of at least seven people who have died in ICE custody or operations in the first 24 days of 2026. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Parady La. Heber Sanchez Domínguez. Victor Manuel Diaz.

This is just January.

They join a long line of names: Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, Sonya Massey. Names that should never be forgotten.

And countless unknown others who will never have the satisfaction of being named, remembered, or mourned beyond their immediate circles.

We keep calling each one the last straw, as if there's a finite number. As if this time will finally be the breaking point. But the straws keep coming. Another name. Another video. Another denial. Another call for accountability that goes unanswered.

This isn't political. It's only superficially about immigration policy or enforcement tactics. This is about whether we accept that authorities can kill people with impunity.

No one deserves to be executed in the street. Not for their documentation status. Not for exercising their rights. Not for anything. The fundamental principle is simple, even if the systems that violate it are complex.

It's up to us to make this the last straw, to stop all future ones. The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further.

My body remembers those Minneapolis streets. My grandchildren will map their own streets, their own paths, their own memories. I want them to grow up in a world where authority doesn't hide behind masks. Where documented truth matters more than institutional denial. Where the places they love don't get rewritten by violence they're told didn't happen. Where the rights given to us by us apply to all of us, without exception.

That world doesn't build itself. It's built through the daily practice of refusing to look away. Of insisting on accountability. Of modeling the kind of authority that earns trust instead of demanding it.

Thirty-five years from Rodney King to Alex Pretti. I don't want my grandchildren marking another thirty-five years of the same cycle. The line is here. The work starts now.