You don't have to experience every horror

This isn't the right place for this. I don't have a right place for this, but I needed to say it.

ICE murdered someone today in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked for the VA, was executed in the street because he was helping someone who had fallen. It's horrifying, it's numbing, and better people than me are finding ways to respond. This is about one tiny facet of that.

There's video. Two different people managed to get video from two different angles of the government executing a man in the street. It's good an important that they videoed it. it's good and important that the recording of this video is widely available. The more places it can be found the harder it is to suppress it because we have to believe in a reckoning.

But you don't have to watch it.

There are people online who will tell you that you do. Who will tell you that you have to experience this in order to be properly angry about this. I've even had someone say to me that I owe it to the man who died to watch his murder. And I don't understand how someone can say that.

There's a form of flagellation that comes with feeling powerless. A sense somewhere inside that if you make yourself feel bad you're doing something. I understand the feeling, and I understand that sometimes we feel guilt at comfort when the world is in pain. But the answer is to find the things you can do. Find the cause you can work for. Do something constructive, or stop something destructive. Pain is not service, service is service, it's just that sometimes service causes pain.

The argument goes that people need to be shocked out of their complacency by this act and the video of the murder is a way to galvanise people. I find that what galvanises people is the fact of the murder. Knowing it happened, knowing who did it, knowing what can be done. Not looking away is good advice, but it's about continuing to pay attention to what is happening, not forcing yourself to Ludovico Technique the horrors of the world.

The world needs your work and your voice, not your trauma. The best way to honour Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and the countless other victims of ICE and the current American administration is to help each other and demand justice. That will do more good for more people than experiencing the horrors of their suffering.