I’ve had a few friends and family members tell me that if Renee Good and Alex Pretti had only stayed home, they’d be alive today. That’s probably true. If we all just stayed in bed all day, we’d be safe. After all, if we drive our car to work or run an errand, we could get killed in a car crash or by a falling meteor. If we cross the street, we could get hit by a truck or struck by an errant jolt of lightening. If we go to school or church or a shopping mall or a concert or a movie theater, we could get shot. It’s safer to just never venture out or take a chance. It’s safer to see evil and look the other way.

I live in Minneapolis. I now have a sense of what it’s like to live in a war zone or an occupied country. I don’t think some people have an idea of what it’s like to live in Minneapolis under this ICE occupation. Do they think there are just some ICE agents rounding up convicted criminals? No, they are terrorizing the entire community, breaking in doors, including those of American citizens without any reason, or court order, demanding that people of color show them their papers and even if they say they are citizens, they drag them off to a detention center not allowing them to even call their families or an attorney for hours. They release them into the freezing cold without worrying how they’ll get home. One 10^th grader was detained and the agents sold his phone to a pawn shop. The economic cost of this occupation will be staggering because people are frightened to leave their homes to even get food. Costs of overtime for our police are skyrocketing. People are too scared to go to work. Our children will suffer because so many are scared to go to school. I dread running errands because I don’t know if I’m going to get in the middle of one of ICE’s attacks on someone on our streets and I don’t know what my reaction will be to see them brutalizing someone. I’m angry. No one should live this way.

 I didn’t know either Renee Good or Alex Pretti, but I think I know why they were there on the streets of Minneapolis bearing witness, resisting.

Hitler created enemies the German people could blame their difficulties on including Communists, Social Democrats, Labor Unions, Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, Blacks, Jehovah’s Witnesses and LGBT people. One of the shocking revelations about Hitler’s rise to power is that churches turned over their own members with Jewish ancestry to the Nazis.

In the U.S., we’re to believe that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are the cause of our difficulties. They are the enemy.

Donald Trump was a bully at a young age prompting his parents to send him to a military school where he perfected his bullying. Now he bullies law firms, media, colleges, and CEOs of large corporations. He bullies Republicans who are afraid to tell the simple truth that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Even the Supreme Court seems scared of him (I wonder about that one). In December of 2025, he decided to bully Minneapolis.

Trump sent thousands of masked, paramilitary, troops into the streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding areas, who began brutalizing Americans including an elderly Hmong-American man, a 17-year Target employee taken, beaten, then dumped off at a Wal-Mart miles away, sobbing and bleeding, without his cell phone, a disabled women on her way to the doctor had her car window smashed and she was dragged off, and who can forget the image of little Liam Ramos, used as bait to try to get his mother? All these people were citizens of the United States or legal immigrants with no criminal record. Is it any wonder that people of good conscience took to our streets to protect our neighbors?

This isn’t about criminals. Of 61 court cases, 1 was found to have a criminal background. Our police arrest criminals, build cases against them, and they are tried in our courts. We don’t allow criminals to just run freely through our city creating mayhem. What this is about is retribution because we didn’t vote for Donald Trump in the past three elections. Pam Bondi is demanding our state’s voting data. It’s punishment. It’s a shakedown. It’s the dangerous beginning stages of rigging the 2026 elections.

 Renee Good and Alex Pretti are American heroes who saw bullying and evil and resisted it. They were both executed in the streets of Minneapolis because they refused to allow these ICE agents sent here by Donald Trump to terrorize our community without any opposition. We see what we are dealing with when these men feel comfortable executing people in our streets while being observed and filmed by dozens of citizens. I don’t know if the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota are more versed in history than other people. I do know they are not going to sit back like the citizens of Germany or Russia and allow a tyrant to gain so much control they can’t be stopped without lots of bloodshed.

So when people tell me that Renee Good or Alex Pretti would be okay today if they’d just minded their own business, I want to ask, “Have you no concept of history?” History is full of bullies. The Roman Empire. Adolf Hitler. Josef Stalin. Vladimir Putin. Bull Connor. Reading about them as a child, I wondered why people tolerated them? Why didn’t people stand up to them before they gained so much power they could destroy anyone who resisted? I’m thankful for Renee Good and Alex Pretti because they have exposed the evil in the streets of Minneapolis.

When I was in third grade and my sister in first grade, a fourth grader grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it in my sister’s face making her cry. I didn’t think about the fact that the fourth grader was older, bigger, and heavier than me. I didn’t think period. I grabbed a handful of snow and ice and ground it in the fourth grader’s face. She was big enough to have beat me up, but instead she ran off crying for her mother. I didn’t feel good about what I’d done, but no one got to make my little sister cry and get by with it. I don’t recall that 4th grader ever bullying someone again. I learned something about bullies that day.  

There was a time when I didn’t stand up to a bully. I regretted it. The event haunted me for a long time and I promised myself I’d never stay silent again. I wrote an essay about the experience and it was published in 2016 in The Commonline Journal’s Fall 2016 edition. Here is that essay:

I Didn’t Speak Up

By Bonnie Wilkins Overcott

          I recognized the woman, with the bleached hair, dark roots, and a life-worn face, struggling to pull her ponderous body up the steps of the bus. She was the woman who attempted to leave her child in the church nursery Sunday morning so she could do some shopping. She wasn’t a member of our church, but it was across the street from the grocery store, and I’m sure she knew her son would be safe with us. Something within the boy, though, did not want her leaving him, he created such a fuss and cried, so she took him with her when she left.

          She sat down on the seats facing me at the front of the bus, rifling through her purse for the bus fare. She was drunk. At one point, she put her arm and hand around her stomach and said, “I don’t feel well.” I was in no mood to get vomited on by a drunken woman, so I moved to the middle of the bus.

          A young, professional man got on the bus and sat where I had been sitting. When she told the bus driver that she was just sure she had bus fare, the man across from her said, “I’ll give you the money for a bus ride, if you get off and take another bus.” People on the bus laughed. The woman began to weep as the bus driver assured her he’d drop her off when she reached her destination.

          As she wept, she complained to the bus driver that she didn’t understand why people were so cruel. The young man wouldn’t let up. He berated her during the entire trip as the rest of the passengers laughed and clapped. Finally, she reached her stop and thanked the bus driver for his kindness before she got off. As she put her foot on the ground, the entire bus cheered. She walked home with the insults and jeers echoing in her mind. And I never spoke up.