"It’s okay, I’m not mad at you…”

Further thoughts on the murderer of Renee Good:
After returning from Iraq, where he served as a machine gunner on a ‘gun truck’, he chooses a career that mirrors the hierarchy of military life and mirrors an organisational culture that encourages an us vs them framing of the world. Then he joins ICE in 2016. There is an eerie repetition here - in terms of power played out through violence, of militaristic hierarchical structures, of framing others as enemy.

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I wonder how much of what we are seeing now - so many people who cleave to Trump and MAGA and Jan 6th can be traced back to the abject failure to address the damage done to men’s psyches fighting an absolutely pointless war. And, most importantly, one America lost.

My instinct is to not give a shit about his history, not to humanize him.

But that would also be to let a whole society, a whole political trajectory, off the hook for creating the man who murdered Renee Good.

But he was made.

And after he was made, he was used, in all his diseased mind, by this Administration, who I would argue were not only aware of the kind of men they’re employing, but in fact, choose them specifically for the disturbed psyches they possess.

I really cannot help but see a very disturbing parallel to 1930’s Germany, where the Nazi party actively sought out and recruited WWI veterans who were traumatised by their war experiences, and then brainwashed by the idea that they would have won the war had it not been for the Jews who, somehow - it’s never very coherent - sold Germany out to their enemies.

When I lived in Vietnam, I met hundreds of Vets who felt driven to come back to the site of their trauma. They were all painfully disoriented to find the battle ground that had haunted them for 20 years was a vibrant, peaceful, and increasingly prosperous country that looked and felt nothing like the place that their minds had been stuck in since they left.

They weren’t happy to find a better place. They were bewildered. And often the response was fairly catastrophic.