I know that dude.
That dude is every contractor who’s ever come into my house. That dude is every first date, every mechanic, every guy walking behind me in the dark. When Renee Good said, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad,” I heard her addressing every man who would or could or might take advantage of us as women.
That “dude” was a peace offering, a reaching out to show we’re not like those other women, the kind who don’t know about cars or home repairs. We’re not weak or uncool. We’re not hysterical or overly emotional. We’re not into drama. No. We’re just like you, dude.
That “dude” is our signal. Our call for mercy.
That “dude” is a please and thank you. Resistance to an unwanted hug. An unwanted anything.
That “dude” is our negotiation for a world that threatens us.
Did the ICE agent kill Ms. Good because he feared her? Or did he kill her because she didn’t fear him?
The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.
In the days since Ms. Good was killed, more agents have been caught on camera asking residents questions like “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”
“Learned what?” asks a woman. “What’s our lesson here?”
“Following federal agents,” an agent says, and then lunges for her phone and snatches it out of her hands. It seems he has no words to explain what, exactly, he is doing and why.
Is fascism our lesson? Is male supremacy our lesson? Hatred? Cowardice? That some citizens are more equal than other citizens? That some of us no longer have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That the First Amendment turns out to be as fragile as rice paper? When there is no moral justification, the only tool that remains is to attack.
The violence just seems to expand, as violence so often does. Daily, now, there are videos of tear gas and physical aggression from the foot soldiers of ICE. I watched another video of a woman trying to tell the men who are dragging her, face down, through the street that she has a brain injury and was on her way to a medical appointment. She is detained by federal agents and forced into their car, for what we do not know. Think back to April, when one of the first broken car windows in an ICE arrest made national news. It was in a town in Massachusetts. A couple sat calmly in the car, on the phone with their immigration lawyer. Think how normal it’s become now to see ICE agents shattering car windows.
I wonder why they so often choose escalation over de-escalation. I wonder if they know how those who perpetrate violence can come to be haunted by their past actions, even if that violence is mandated by the state. Recently, I watched a documentary called “In Waves and War” that premiered at Telluride. The film follows three former Navy SEALs with severe PTSD. It is a moving examination of what it means to live in the aftermath of war, of the unbearable moral weight of what these men did and saw and endured. Each new generation, it seems, must relearn how difficult it is to find peace after war.
The three men are racked by trauma. One wife says she could look into her husband’s eyes and see that he was simply not there. The men go to Mexico and use psychedelic drugs to treat their PTSD. They expected, while on the drugs, to see images from the battles they’d faced as Navy SEALs, the battles in which they’d lost friends and been injured and nearly lost their own lives.
But instead, says a man named DJ, what comes are visions from childhood of his father’s rage and violence and humiliations. How terrified he was of his dad. And how he learned to mirror that rage and violence toward his own children.
“If we didn’t abuse children,” a veteran asks in the film, “would we have a military?”
These men release their trauma at least in part through their own wrecked and cathartic sobbing. How rare, I think, to see a grown man drowning and then healing something in himself through anguished tears. Rare and beautiful, because he is finally engaged in the full range of what it means to be human.
I do not know the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good, but I know the impulse for violence tends to come from the experience of pain. If this applies to Ms. Good’s killer, I hope he can find his way out of that pain someday, not because he deserves it or because I want to absolve him, but because no good comes to a world that gets in the way of men like him.
That ICE agent may not have known what Renee Good’s “dude” meant. Someday he may learn. In the meantime, I hope that word is an auditory purgatory, a looped soundtrack — dude, dude, dude — that’s as difficult to escape as a bullet.
Rachel Louise Snyder (@RLSWrites) is a professor of creative writing and journalism at American University. She is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” and “Women We Buried, Women We Burned.”
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