So It Goes

How authoritarian power teaches us to sort people into deserving and disposable

“We are so seldom told the truth,” Kurt Vonnegut said in a lecture at Case Western University during the Iraq War. “And Hamlet in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is, and we respond to that. Thank you, Bill… We pretend to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and you think about our training in this matter. All we do is echo the feelings of people around us.”

We stumble through life knowing we will never have enough sympathy to keep up with all the wrongs happening around us. Especially now. We inevitably ask ourselves hard questions. Who is innocent? Who was good enough? Whose death should we mourn?

Who, if anyone, should we seek justice for?

In the most recent episode of Next Comes What, Andrea Pitzer reveals how governments weaponize our moral sensibilities against our neighbors.

When Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot by DHS agents in Minneapolis, and when Keith Porter Jr. was killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, the public reaction focused intensely on their innocence. Good was helping neighbors. Pretti was a gun-owning American veteran. Porter helped foster children. The media and mourners rushed to establish that these were “good people” who “didn’t deserve” to die.

But here’s the trap: what happens when we can’t easily establish someone’s innocence?

Pitzer deliberately chose to focus on the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban immigrant who died in ICE custody at Camp East Montana, America’s largest concentration camp. His past included a conviction for sexual contact with a minor and drug charges. Unsurprisingly, his death did not spark the sort of protests we’ve seen since the murders of Good and Pretti.

Then the medical examiner ruled Campos’ death a homicide—he was choked to death by guards—destroying ICE’s preposterous original claim that the 55-year-old father of four was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.

It’s in tragedies with inconvenient victims, like the killing of Geraldo Lunas Campos, when Vonnegut’s wisdom must hit us the hardest. We think we know the good (innocent people killed) from the bad (criminal detained and dies). We’ve been trained to sort humans into categories of deserving and undeserving. And in doing so, we echo the very system we must resist.

By now, we must know that we cannot trust this regime or its enforcers to tell the truth. We must refuse to give them license to kill anyone they label a criminal—especially when they proudly admit that they consider anyone with brown skin, or anyone who watches them invade our neighborhoods, a suspect or even a “terrorist.”

The power to determine who is “innocent enough” to live cannot belong to overreaching authoritarians bent on trampling every check on their power.

Alex Pretti was a white American gun owner who supported veterans—exactly the demographic this administration claims to represent. He stepped in to help someone being chased by ICE agents. Days later, he was shot dead in the street. The fragile line between “good” and “bad” people shifts constantly to push aside anyone who does not pledge allegiance to Trumpism. It has already shifted to include people who looked safe. It will never stop shifting until this regime is stopped.

Drawing from her global history of concentration camps, Pitzer exposes how these regimes deliberately make “legal existence next to impossible” for targeted groups. In Nazi Germany, in Myanmar, under South African Apartheid, daily existence outside certain boundaries became criminalized. Once nearly everyone in a group has broken some law, innocence becomes irrelevant. The trap closes.

“Only being able to mourn or demand justice for the purely innocent,” Pitzer warns, “binds the public into a tighter and tighter trap that ultimately harms everyone.”

This is the painful epiphany Vonnegut was pointing toward: our refusal to sit with ambiguity, our desperate need to sort news into “good” and “bad,” can make us complicit. We echo the feelings around us—the comfortable narrative that some deaths matter more than others, that some people deserve rights while others don’t.

The lonely truth we’re seldom told is that rights only work when they apply to everyone, especially those we find it hardest to defend. The moment we accept that the government can kill, detain, or abuse people based on their past or identity, we’ve granted that same power over ourselves. We just don’t know it yet.

We can’t know enough about life to sort it neatly. But we must know that when we rush to only champion “the good,” we help build the cage that can hold us all.

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