Earlier tonight, there was a shooting near Riza's and my flat. It lasted a grand long while; small arms, shotguns, flashbang grenades, possibly other kinds of explosives, police sirens racing by on the road, it was a scene out of some 2000s cop show. Riza and I sheltered in the interior corridor and I dashed about madly on the internet to find something about what was going on, but the local news is 95% AI generated these days and more interested in folksy shit like "meet your neighbour day at the methodist church" or something like that. Reddit was no help, since no one had posted to the local subreddit since the shooting began, the police calls list online haven't been updated in a week, I was just banging into walls. Nothing left to do but just hug Riza and wait. I was pretty much catatonic during the event except for when I had to venture out to look through the blinds into the carpark to see if anything was still going on.
Riza went back to playing GBA on Retroarch and I carried on making our Kraft Dinner. The gravity of the situation finally dropped me into a deep dark pit and I dropped the spoon and started crying as I realised that one or both of us could have died. They rushed into the kitchen to comfort me some more, but it was more than just this one shooting. How many shootings happen in an hour in this country? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands even? I realised that I had been hiding behind a veil of smoke this whole time, thinking that certain people are incontrovertibly safe in this country.
I had felt privileged to be white. Transfem, perhaps, but still white. In time of crisis, I could exploit my whiteness to be completely safe from all harm and, if someone did harm me, they would face swift judgment and harsh punishment. But that is not the case. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were white, they were shot down by ICE all the same. Call me racist if you want, but I didn't realise how totally fucked we are until shit started happening to white people. I know, I know, hundreds of Black deaths at the hands of police and thousands of Latines getting deported and families getting split up at the border just for yuks wasn't enough to get me to realise the full depth of the situation. I only saw the iceberg on the horizon, I didn't see how deep it went. However, when potentially a dozen people started firing guns within walking distance of my house, that finally drove the point home and crashed it through the back of the garage: nobody is safe.
This is a fascist authoritarian regime Americans are living under. Nobody in power cares about data correlation, investigation, warrants, rights, ethics, or morals. If someone presents an easy target, they will die and the regime will justify it. "He was clearly intent upon massacring law enforcement." "She was an agitator who was threatening an agent with vehicular homicide." "They were planning to carry out an act of domestic terrorism." "These are heinous monsters who must be held accountable."
Any one of us, or multiple of us, at any time, can be simply ganged up on by police, ICE agents, border patrol, or rightwing militiamen, gunned down in an act of hatred, and then they can simply walk away without facing any scrutiny or punitive measures. It doesn't matter how many cameras, whistles, or protestors are present the regime will discredit all detractors. It doesn't matter how many laws are made to attempt to curb this behaviour— what's that old saying? You can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house?
What, then, is left? If protest, callouts, and laws won't stop the regime, what else is left?
Nobody is safe in America. Nobody.