Men with Guns

As dusk darkened, the light from thousands of flickering candles merged into a stream of gold. Stretching down Broadway, it arced upward as the silent protest crossed Boulder Creek and rose up the hill north of it. For years, I have remembered that rising river of light. The words of the Rev. Martin Luther King —  “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (1) — rekindle the image in my mind’s eye. I can’t begin to count how many protests and vigils I have joined since that evening in mid-March, 1970.

I have marched for peace, for racial justice, for the rule of law and self-determination, for an end to fascism, and the need to care for the earth and the lives intertwined upon it. I spent nearly 40 years working for those values, sacrificing much of family life and many personal pleasures in the name of social justice. I thought the golden arc was bending toward justice; I was looking forward to a quiet retirement. But now, there’s a plot twist. Last week, in January 2025, agents of ICE (2) shot and killed two unarmed protesters in Minneapolis, bringing back to me a Stephen Stills song (3) written in 1970:

Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio.

The shock of masked men killing unarmed citizens with automatic weapons — an extreme and illegal action — hits me once again, awakening the same the horror I felt back then. This winter, I have found myself struggling to keep on believing, to keep on protesting, to keep from surrendering to despair.

As individuals, we hope our white skin, our gender, our class, and/or our citizenship will exempt us from what we fear might happen, what already is happening to those without those particular badges of privilege. But the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti undermine that hope. They feel to me like a point of inflection and a refrain:

Gotta get down to it, ICE is gunning us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew them and found them dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

The last words of Renee Good, a 37-year old mom in Minneapolis, felt eerily familiar: “It’s okay dude, I’m not mad at you.” She was smiling out of her car’s window. She was approached by at least three agents, one of whom demanded that she “get out of the fucking car.” When Renee finally did get out of her car – after being shot three times with an automatic weapon – she was hauled out, dead and covered in her own blood.

Would compliance have saved her? Many argue that it would have, even though her race, class, and residential status did not. Still, the placating tone of her words, when she was speaking to Jonathan Ross – a masked stranger holding an automatic weapon – suggests that she was trying to signal non-aggression, to appease. Watching the videos, her tone and gestures felt eerily familiar. I too have appeased bullies and sometimes, it worked.

Before the Kent State shootings, I didn’t have much experience of men with guns. My life had already taught me that men were often dangerous, especially in groups. Many had hair triggers and could inflict bodily injury. But mostly, they didn’t do it with guns. And mostly, representatives of the United States government, in its many levels and many departments, did not shoot ordinary US citizens. Until Kent State.

That 1970 candlelight march from the University of Colorado (CU) campus to the Boulder courthouse memorialized four students who were killed at Kent State University. The Kent State protest, in turn, came in reaction to the US invading Cambodia, which had been technically (but not tactically) neutral in the Vietnam War. But frequent shootings had been occurring since 1968, my senior year in high school. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot on April 4 of that year, and then on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated. We mourned, we marched, we protested.

Then came the spring of 1970, the beginning of what I’ll call my decade of too many men with too many guns. That spring, leaders of the Black Panther party had been jailed, having been accused of murdering one of their own; huge urban and campus protests demanded their release. (The FBI’s COINTELPRO program had working to surveil, infiltrate and discredit the Panthers through harassment, false charges, witness intimidation, and even assassinations.) More than 40,000 young men (mostly men) had been killed in Vietnam. The first draft lottery had been held the previous December, and a common question we asked of young men was “What’s your number?” A low number meant a stark choice of death in the jungles or defying the draft by fleeing to Canada.

President Nixon touched off a fuse in this American tinderbox on April 30, announcing live on all three national news networks that US helicopters were dropping 30,000 US and 50,000 South Vietnamese troops into eastern Cambodia. Invading a neutral country! As Henry Kissinger later wrote: Nixon had decided to go for “the big play” for “all the marbles” since he anticipated “a hell of an uproar at home” regardless of what he did. Nixon got one. Like now in Minneapolis, protests grew and spread across the country.

In the taut, tense summer of 1970, a stranger suddenly grabbed me in the CU Denver Center lobby, frog-walked me up a semi-open stairway, and forced me to sit beside him as he ranted. He was light-skinned African-American, not much taller than me, but muscular, wiry and wired. He nervously revealed a handgun in his pocket. I was apparently being held hostage, but for what? He told me that the FBI was after him, but it was a case of mistaken identity. I understood only bits and pieces: yes, the FBI had targeted the Black Panthers in Denver. Lauren Watson, who started the Denver chapter, had been jailed and was on trial… but what did that have to do with my captor, or me?

I commiserated, I listened, I signaled compliance. I suspect that I sounded much like  Renee Good. I never learned the connections, or even my captors’s name. After a few Denver cops appeared in the crowd below us, visible from the semi-open stairway, my assailant suddenly let go, bolted up the stairs and disappeared.

I reacted with a similar show of compliance in 1973, when I stepped out of the shower, to find my naked self confronted by another man armed with a gun. Not a stranger; this was my husband Don, brandishing a rifle that I didn’t know he owned. He was dressed in jeans, a buffalo plaid jacket, and hunting boots. I wore nothing but a hopeful expression. Dripping, I reached for a towel, shivering more from fear than cold.

This time, the gun was an silent accusation. Although Don refused to answer questions — Why was he angry? What had I done? What did he want? — deep down, I had a suspicion. I had been thinking about leaving him, talking to a girlfriend about going to her place, making tentative plans. Earlier, Don had thrown me down the basement stairs; he had also shoved me several times. I was afraid of him. I hadn’t said anything around him, nor on the phone. But did he somehow know? I kept talking, placating, quietly drying myself, reaching for my robe.  Once again, I was able to talk my way out of it.

Then again, 10 years later, while traveling in West Africa with husband number three, I was again confronted by men with guns. This time, David and I were being chauffeured to the airport in Accra by a “driver”, someone associated with the friend we had visited in Kumasi, Ghana. We came to a blockade. The car was pulled over by a group of men dressed in khaki and camouflage, brandishing machine guns. Like current residents of Minnesota, who are confronted by unidentified ICE agents, I had no idea who these men were or what they were looking for. As they popped the trunk and pulled the seats out of the car, I had no idea what they discussed with the driver.  I didn’t speak the language. I had no idea whether these men with guns would demand my US passport, and if they did, whether it would prove a help or a hindrance.

I have always taken pride, and usually comfort, in being an American citizen. I love what this country has stood for; my father and two uncles all served in the Allied forces that constituted the international “Anti-fa” coalition that opposed fascism, the murder of millions of Jews, and the invasion of neutral countries. Drawing from both my personal experiences and what history teaches about facing men with guns, I come to this conclusion: Appeasement — the diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict — works only up to a point, only when the rule of law is honored and only when there’s a conscience to appeal to. Those qualities enabled Ghandi to resist the British in India. The lack of those qualities caused Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to fail when he tried to appease Adolph Hitler in the run-up to WWII. Many cheered Chamberlain’s announcement of the Munich Agreement with Hitler at the end of September 1938. But that same month, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain attempted to censor the news and control public opinion. Still, many continued to support Neville’s claim of having secured “peace in our time” right up until Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938.  Germany’s invasion of Poland, just one year later, marked the start of WWII.

Minnesota is seeing round-ups of ordinary people who resemble a stereotype. Warrantless raids on private homes. Un-identified government agents arresting, kidnapping and killing citizens. Threatened invasion of neutral countries. It feels to me like a night of broken glass. And it signals that appeasement and apparent capitulation won’t work with Donald Trump

I’m too old to hide, but I’m also too outspoken to virtue-signal compliance. The choice for me comes down to defying death or defending democracy. When they came for the immigrants, I started protesting and donating as if my life depended on it… because I know the rest of the bloody poem.(4)

___

FOOTNOTES:

1. In his speech, Reverend King was actually quoting a 1853 sermon by the Rev. Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist who called for the abolition of slavery.

2. ICE stands for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

3. Ohio” lyrics, song by Crosby, Stills and Nash, released in June, 1970.

4. The poem reference is “First They Came” written by Pastor Martin Niemöller about the NAZIs. In part, it reads: First they came for the Communists/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Communist…Then they came for the Jews/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.