I don’t need graphic footage to understand…

I am enraged, heartbroken, and shaken.

I don’t need graphic footage to understand what happened. The reporting is already clear. As News, Not News wrote this week, what we are witnessing is not a single tragic mistake, but the predictable outcome of a system that has been expanding its authority while eroding its accountability.

That framing matters to me. It tells the truth without asking me to traumatize myself by watching footage over and over again just to prove I’m paying attention.

How many people have been violated, intimidated, and unlawfully attacked as ICE was unleashed? How many U.S. citizens, like Alex Pretti, have had their lives so brazenly taken by federal agents on U.S. soil?

My sister has been a nurse for 17 years. All of this has been terrifying, but I think she saw herself in this man. She called with so much rage, a rage that is understandable. A compassionate human being, an ICU nurse who dedicated his life to caring for others, showing up for patients and community alike, is now gone forever.

I am angry, so angry. Rage is the proper response when systems built to protect instead kill. But left untamed, it becomes hollow and exhausting to live in it too long.

I don’t believe the fight for justice or accountability looks the same for everyone. Some are on the streets. Some are making phone calls. Some are writing from afar. Every role matters if it advances justice without abandoning our humanity.

One thing News, Not News keeps returning to is how spectacle is a tool, not an accident. The outrage cycle, the viral clips, the constant demand that we look, share, prove we’re horrified. All of it keeps us activated but also fragmented.

I refuse that part. Not because I’m disengaged, but because I want my anger to be useful.

I don’t think the fight for accountability, reform, and dignity will be won by physical confrontation for most of us. That’s what trained folks and our legal systems are for. I would be in the way if I tried to take their role on.

What I will do: Know the names and stories of people like Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran, Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos…

I will hold space for my grief and allow myself to cry, without shame. Meet my neighbours and build community, because isolation and fear feed the machinery of authoritarianism. Call my representatives in Texas repeatedly until my voice becomes a persistent irritation they cannot ignore.

What I saw most in the U.S. as we prepared to move was a pervasive disconnect. Disconnect breeds fear. Fear, when left unchecked, turns quickly into othering. The “us vs. them” mentality makes injustice easier to ignore: I’m not an immigrant, so this doesn’t touch me. I’m not going to protests, so this can’t happen to me.

The antidote is not denial or numbness. The antidote is not warping yourself into the box the oppressor is putting you in. The antidote is connection: to neighbours, to our country’s story and its failures, to our shared humanity, and to the actions we are capable of taking that reflect the values we claim to hold.

This moment is destabilizing not just because of the violence, but because the rules themselves can be suspended. As legal scholar Aziz Huq explained in an interview with News, Not Noise, “Authoritarianism doesn’t require anarchy. It requires the ability to turn the law on and off.”

Most of the time, in authoritarian regimes life continues as normal: schools open, bills get paid, people go to work. But in an instant, the state can flip a switch. Deciding who is protected by the law, and who is not.

For Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, the law was switched off. Then the law switched on to shield the agents who killed him. The violence was not lawless; it was state-sanctioned.

I want to be enraged. I want to weep. I want to do justice by the people who have been hurt, by the people we have lost.

But I also believe that the fight for a better future calls for a kind of clarity that preserves our minds, our hearts, and our communities. And that, to me, is a rage worth sustaining. A rage that doesn’t consume me before it can change anything.