Motus Mentis

We’ve all been watching the nation react to the shooting, by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, of a 37-year-old woman named Renee Good. MS. Good had been in her car, blocking the road while protesting ICE operations — and when the car was surrounded by agents, and she was told to get out, she hit the gas while an officer was in front of the car, and was fatally shot.

The circumstances were just ambiguous enough (was she trying to ram the officer, or just drive away? Did she actually strike the officer with the car?) that public reaction immediately divided sharply, with a number of officials and “influencers” declaring it an act of murder, or even “cold-blooded” murder. Others (including me) saw it as cause and effect: the woman shouldn’t have been there interfering with law enforcement, and she should have done as she was told. By accelerating toward that officer, she created a sudden life-or-death situation — and in such situation, sometimes there is death.

At first I was concerned that we might see widespread jacquerie of the sort that followed the death of George Floyd (who. as we all remember, died in 2020 of a drug overdose while resisting arrest). But I don’t think that’s going to happen this time around, for three reasons: a) the ambiguity of the circumstances, which makes a self-defense argument more than slightly plausible; b) the fact that Ms. Good was white, which greatly diminishes her appeal as a martyr (George Floyd’s race trumped even his lifetime criminal history, which included robbing a pregnant woman at gunpoint during a home invasion!); and c) that it’s January, and taking to the streets is simply a lot less fun in the winter, especially in Minneapolis, even if you get to warm up a bit as the cars and local businesses burn. Black people simply aren’t going to start rioting and looting over a dead white woman, especially when it’s cold out.

So I think this one’s going to fizzle out, but not without cracking the great fissure at the heart of our society a little wider.

Even though I think it’s clear enough that Ms. Good, by her actions, was the proximate cause of her untimely death, there’s a bigger question, here, and a larger causal web to consider. Why on Earth would this woman put herself in such a dangerous position in the first place, and behave so stupidly? I think it’s at least in part due to what it’s like to grow up female in the modern West. Boys learn early on about the consequences of physical confrontation; it’s hard for a boy to get to adulthood without having learned the hard way that if you get up in peoples’ faces, you’re likely to end up with your own face getting hammered. Girls, whose social interactions are very different, aren’t taught to fear the immediate physical consequences of their behavior the way boys are — and this, combined with a modern culture that no longer shelters and protects them the way our civilization used to, but which, rather, tells them that they are supposed to go fearlessly into the world demanding whatever they want on an equal (or even superior) basis, puts them into a very dangerous situation: they believe that what seems to them “fair” or “just” or “right” actually offers them an invisible shield of protection and entitlement, and so they get themselves into situations, and even aggressive confrontations, that they don’t realize actually carry significant existential peril. I think Renee Good would almost certainly still be alive today were it not for this grotesque cultural pathology; she would simply have known better than to have confronted rough men with guns the way she did.

Finally: what’s happened to Minneapolis, anyway? How did we go from Fran Tarkenton and Mary Richards to all of this? Why Minneapolis? I wish my old friend Tony Bouza, who was chief of the MPD for many years, were still around to talk to about this.