An Epistle from Home

I'm not mad at you. 

Do you need help? 

These are phrases commonly used by domestic terrorists. Or so our government would like us to believe. I'm not mad at you. Do you need help? 

My stepson is mixed, Caucasian / Indonesian. He was born in America, came here to Indonesia with his mother and me when he was about 10, and then some years later returned to the US to finish out high school and enter college. He lives there in Arizona, works at a bank, lives with his father, who is also mixed Caucasian and Indonesian. 

He sent me a message today on Instant Messenger. Said he misses me. Talked about some old memories from his childhood, times and events that I myself have no recollection of. It's funny the things that little children store away in the memory. Things of little matter that somehow do matter.

I said that I hoped that all is okay with him back there in the States.

Not to worry you, he wrote, but you already know that things are less than stellar. What's worse, between you and me, is that my dad is on team red. I always knew he was the way he is, but he is actively rooting for ICE now. 

A lot of my friends are Mexican and I'm worried for them, but he can't get it through his head that my friends might be in danger because of their race.

He simply lacks empathy. 

I'm worried too. I'm worried for my son. In a strange way, it seems like he has never quite understood that he is not white. Yes, his entire reference is America, he dresses like a young American, he thinks like a young American, his culture is fully America, not Indonesia. But he is not white. He could just as well be targeted as his Mexican friends. Yes, he is an American citizen, but so are his friends most likely, or at least legal residents. But we have seen that this does not matter to ICE.

If one of his friends were in trouble, and he came to their aid, what might he say to the assailants? I'm not mad at you? 

What might he ask his friend, other than Do you need help? 

And what might be the penalty for those simple words?

This is the reason you are my favorite parent, he concluded in his note today. 

And he, regardless of parentage, regardless of race, regardless of anything under the sun, is my beloved son. 

Look what they've done. 

Look what they've done. 

Look What They Done to My Country

Look what they done to my song, ma 

Look what they done to my song 

    --Melanie, 1970

"What have you done!", the woman shrieked as she ran across the icy Minneapolis street. "What the fuck have you done!" 

The SUV had already stopped moving, crunching up against a parked car. One bullet had crashed through the front windshield, two others were fired through the open driver side window at point blank range. 

By the time the the horrified woman reached the car, the ICE agent was already walking away, ignoring her screams. On the videos captured, his face appears to show no appreciation of having just taken a human life. 

It's just another day. 

Except for this woman's 6-year-old child. Except for her family members and friends. 

She was well-loved, the background stories tell us. She was unusually kind. She was involved in the community.

A physician on the scene tried to help, but was blocked by ICE agents. The victim was dead before she reached the hospital. She was probably dead before the second and third bullets burst through her skull. Spilling out of the glove compartment in the car were some of her daughter's beloved stuffed animals. The driver's side airbag was splattered red with blood. 

She was a domestic terrorist, we are told by the authorities, out to use her car as a deadly weapon. 

This 37-year-old woman with a glove compartment full of stuffed animals.

Look what they done to my song, ma. 

Look what they done to my song.

Well they tied it up in a plastic bag 

Turned it upside down, ma. 

Look what they done to my song.

I have seen the videos, and I have heard all the increasingly desperate, obvious lies. I have seen and heard the cold-hearted and stunning utter lack of remorse. She was the killer, we are told, not the man with the gun. 

And I am filled with rage. I am filled with a white hot hatred of those who are telling their evil tales, and of those who are offering their heartless, ignorant, careless comments on social media. Their irresponsible, disingenuous, cowardly excuses. It was her own fault. She had it coming. Good riddance.

I wish I could find a good book to live in 

Wish I could find a good book 

Well if I could find a real good book 

I'd never have to come out and look at 

What they done to my song

Look what they've done to my country.

She had a name, by the way. 

Renee Nicole Good

Murdered January 7, 2026

Love One Another

"I love mankind," he said,"but I marvel at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular, separately, that is, as individual persons. In my dreams," he said, "I would often arrive at fervent plans of devotion to mankind and might very possibly have gone to the cross for human beings, had that been suddenly required of me, and yet I am unable to spend two days in the same room with someone else, and this I know from experience. No sooner is that someone else close to me than his personality crushes my self-esteem and hampers my freedom. In the space of a day and a night I am capable of coming to hate even the best of human beings: one because he takes too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and is perpetually blowing his nose. I become the enemy of others," he said, "very nearly as soon as they come into contact with me. To compensate for this, however, it has always happened that the more I have hated human beings in particular, the more ardent has become my love for mankind in general.

--The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here is a sentiment that Sartre expressed as well, and more succinctly at that, when he wrote simply that "Hell is other people" (L'enfer est les autres). This in turn has often been variously misquoted to read something like 'The only problem with heaven is other people'. But the point is the same. We nurture a cozy feeling of love toward mankind that is assailable only by mankind--not the fuzzy ideal, but the walking, talking, nose blowing critter itself. 

This brings to mind the scripture (John 4:20) which tells us that "If someone says,'I love God', and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he is not seen?

Well, you would be surprised, or more probably you would not be, for as anyone can see in social media posts and counterposts, the world is chock full of people who love God (supposedly) and at the same time maintain a nearly murderous disdain for their fellow human beings.

Ah well, just some things to think about, which have come to mind in my reading of the Brothers Karamazov, a very long, very dense, very talky novel indeed but one that has long been on my bucket list of things I really ought to read.