Today is Virginia Woolf’s 144th birthday. I should bake her a cake. But since I live in the United States, it is difficult to feel like celebrating. Not when federal agents — ICE* and Border Control — have once again murdered an innocent American citizen in cold blood. Instead, I must speak out.

The murder victims

On Jan. 7, it was Renee Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three who was observing a protest against ICE in Minneapolis, Minnesota. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her three times in less than one second, including a fatal shot to her head, as she peacefully sat in her car while accosted by three agents.

Yesterday, Jan., 24, it was Alex Pretti, a 37-year old ICU nurse at the local Veteran’s Hospital, who was filming agents with his phone and trying to help a woman the agents had pushed to the ground for no apparent reason. Federal agents then pushed him to the ground, piled on top of him, and beat him with a pepper spray can. They then shot him dead as he lay there. At least 10 shots were fired within five seconds.

Both victims were white. Both victims were braving the bitter Minnesota cold. Both victims were trying to help their immigrant neighbors who each day are being pulled from their homes, their cars, and their workplaces. They are beaten and sprayed with chemical agents. They are kidnapped and taken to detention centers by masked and unidentified federal agents who delight in terrorizing communities and using their power to cause people pain.

Federal leaders spin a web of lies

In both cases, the federal government has slandered the murder victims and blamed them for their own deaths. Federal leaders — the felonious president, the toady vice-president, and the cosplaying Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem —  immediately spin lies that contradict the visual evidence of the many videos and eyewitness testimonies.

These corrupt leaders refuse to do what Woolf advises in her anti-war polemic Three Guineas (1938): “fix our eyes upon the photograph again: the fact” and they advise us to believe their lies, not our eyes.

The witnesses who believe their eyes, not the lies, are everyday people who turn out on the streets of their neighborhoods to protect their communities. They do their best to protect vulnerable neighbors from lawless federal agents running amok with the full support and encouragement of the federal government — from our felonious president on down.

Eyes open, no one safe

Black people in this country have experienced all of this before. They have lived through slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, segregation, the civil rights movement, Rodney King, and more. But those of us who are white are not accustomed to thinking of our government as an entity that will hunt us down and cause us great harm.

That is all changing. Now we know that none of us is safe from the government we fund with our tax dollars, no matter the color of our skin or the country of our birth.

I learned this nearly 56 years ago on May 4, 1970, when four of my fellow students were murdered by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

On that day, National Guard troops fired somewhere between 61 and 67 bullets in 13 seconds, killing four and wounding nine. All were innocent, unarmed students. Two were protesting. Two were walking to class. I have not felt safe around uniformed law enforcement or military personnel since.

Woolf and the absence of photos

I have always wondered, as have many others, why Woolf did not include any photos of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War in Three Guineas, despite referring to “the dead bodies, the ruined houses” numerous times.

I think I may finally understand. I have referred to the murders of two Minnesotans numerous times in this post, but I have included no photos. Somehow, it did not seem right to do so.

Instead, I felt compelled to use my words to speak honestly and bluntly — without any editorial cautions — about the events we are experiencing here and those who are leading them. Our leaders’ orchestration of illegal and despicable acts are calculated to distract us from the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files, while promoting a tyrannical regime that will have complete control over our country and the Western Hemisphere.

We must use all our faculties to resist. For, as Woolf wrote in Three Guineas,

we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience” . . . for a “common interest unites us; it is one world, one life (168).

Some birthday posts

Though I could not write a celebratory post for today, I am adding a few of those posted online by others.

*U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement