Renee Good and Alex Pretti now have Wikipedia pages about them. Well, not about them. About their deaths. Their pages are titled "The Killing of...." These are detailed accounts of what happened to each of them at the hands of ICE and Border Patrol agents.
Those pages are not really about Good and Pretti, not their lives or their personalities, not what a great mom Good might have been or how Pretti was well-liked among the doctors and nurses he worked with. Just how they were shot, what brought about the circumstances and how they both died in the street as people on both sides of this domestic terror looked on.
Can you imagine? You get up one day just like any other average human in this country, go through your normal morning routine, whatever it may be--coffee, a shower, a kiss goodbye to your loved ones--and you exit home, never to return. By end of day, reporters, journalists, law enforcement agents, are scanning all your social media, swiping your photos and posting them--the ones that make you look great, the ones you wish had never gotten 'out there.' Your friends and co-workers and family members are being interviewed. "Tell us about...." While your body lies on a slab in the morgue.
Within days, your name is being used in a slogan. "Be Pretti Good." It's all over social media. You are vilified by some, heroic to others.
Because they know you only by that one act. That one moment when you made a decision to participate instead of sitting on the sidelines. You didn't expect you were offering your life. You didn't expect you were giving up all your dreams for the future. You didn't expect it would break the hearts of those who love you. You just thought it might make, on that one day, a tiny difference.
What is the most heartbreaking for me about those Wikipedia pages is that these two individuals are defined there by what happened to them. Not by who they were. Not by their hopes and dreams and aspirations. Not by their day-to-day lives. Alex Pretti had a dog. Just like me. Renee Good loved to sing and write poetry. Just like me.
Whether you see them as villain or hero, they were, in truth, just like me. Just like you. I hope to heaven you see that. See them.
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