This is a tough month for me, even before taking into account national news. It’s the Looper birthday month, with Corey’s on Jan. 5 (our paternal grandma’s was on Jan. 4), and Mitch’s today; Corey’s been gone since November 2021, and Mitch has only been gone a few months. Mitch’s daughter Sarah had her birthday Monday, and mine was Tuesday. (I spent the afternoon of Sarah’s birthday renewing my license. What fun.)

Birthdays bring remembrances, both good and bad. They also remind us that we’re only here for a short while, and our end could come sooner than we imagine.

I’m sure Renee Good certainly didn’t anticipate her end coming so soon.

Whatever else you believe about what happened in Minneapolis last Wednesday, there should be no dispute that it shouldn’t have happened. A mother of three, a wife, and a poet was shot dead through her windshield.

It didn’t take long for competing narratives to appear, but even in the cellphone video of the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good, it’s difficult to find what seemed truly threatening to him, enough for him to apparently switch his phone to his left hand so he could pull out his gun. Surely it wasn’t the very good dog sitting in the back seat, looking out the window, so …

I mean, what else could it be other than her good nature and lack of fear, and Good’s wife smarting off to him, which is about when he appears to switch hands (and before he crossed in front of the SUV and Good began to turn the vehicle away from him)? Dang uppity females.

Coming from a long line of uppity women, with a lot more in my circle of friends, I understand that sometimes we can come off as threatening … I mean, all that speaking up, especially to men who talk down to us and call us names (like “f- – -ing b- – – -, uttered apparently by the ICE agent). How dare we! Don’t we realize we need permission to speak around men?

I’ve read so much fear in my Facebook and Threads feeds over the past week from my female friends, but now that fear is turning more to resolve. To not be a victim. To not stay silent. To be more present in life and cherish what we have, even when it’s not much (right now, I cherish my family and friends, and love them more than I can say).

We’re accustomed, as women, to being treated as “less than,” but we’re far from the only ones. People of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and members of various religions have for years been subject to such treatment, but now that a white woman who, frankly, looks like me and many of my friends, has been killed, many more are realizing that none of us are really safe.

It shouldn’t have to take that. It shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you.

Renee Good isn’t the first woman, or lesbian, or even the first white person to be killed as a result of needless government action. There have been more of countless races, creeds, religions, genders and political affiliations killed before, and there will continue to be more as long as we do nothing to stand up to it.

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it should be obvious that the death of Renee Good shouldn’t have happened. Had ICE not been targeting the neighborhood for weeks, partially due to a viral video that was as much misinformation as it was divisive, Good wouldn’t have felt compelled to put her vehicle where it was (though other vehicles could still, and did, drive around her). Had ICE agents followed procedure (Department of Justice standards say a moving vehicle alone isn’t a deadly threat, and officers must attempt to move out of the way rather than fire; ICE is also not authorized to make non-immigration traffic stops, nor detain U.S. citizens), it wouldn’t have happened. If the agent hadn’t felt “threatened” by the mere presence of a lesbian couple and their dog, well (as others have noted, they were doing a hell of a lot less than the people who entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and those who were convicted for their parts, including for sedition, were pardoned by the current president; the one person killed by a Capitol police officer was attempting to crawl through the broken glass window of a door when officers and others had real reason to fear for their lives) …

And if more people were measured in their responses, waiting for more information to come in before spouting off in blatantly hyperpartisan fashion about what happened just to stir the pot, we certainly wouldn’t still be fighting. Then again, that’s what so many seem to thrive on. I’m sure in the comments section in the newspaper version of this column, the trolls will be doing their darnedest yet again to put words in my mouth and call me a stupid woman. That’s what they do, and it hurts dere widdle feewings when mean ladies call them out.

Too bad all the sniping is making us miss the bigger picture. A woman died who shouldn’t have had to in the midst of a nation dealing with an administration that has been overstepping its bounds for a while. No matter what side you land on politically, that overstepping should bother you because next time it may be you.

If it doesn’t bother you, I’d advise reading the Constitution (just the words there, no commentary). If you don’t have a pocket Constitution, it’s pretty easy to find a copy of the text on the Internet (the Legal Information Institute, the National Constitution Center and the American Bar Association are just a few of the very reliable places you can read it; normally I’d include the National Archives, but since it’s part of the government …)

🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗

There have been bright spots in all the darkness of late, thankfully. Perhaps my favorite is that “chicken allowance” has been trending on social media. It seems someone on Threads found she was sent anonymous funds, with the note “for rotisserie chicken,” and posted about it, and some have decided to start sending strangers a “chicken allowance” on Venmo and other cash apps. (Um, I like rotisserie chicken …)

Some of the funniest bits from the whole affair have been the posts by Gabby Sidibe and her husband Brandon Frankel. Gabby posted, “Everyone thinks my husband is great and that he loves me so much but he has never EVER offered me a chicken allowance.” Brandon relented in a long and sweet post, to which Gabby replied, “Not reading all that. Sorry that happened to you or congratulations. Just put the chicken money in my cashapp.”

That’s the kind of marital back-and-forth that reminds me of my Nanny Opal and Grandpa Grover, and it just makes me happy.

Wilma Peeny summed the whole thing up so well with, “My feed is full of chicken allowance posts and I feel like my heart is going to burst from seeing this kind of joy and mutual aid.”

In a time that’s been so dark, it’s those sparks of happiness and humor that make life more bearable. More chicken allowances, and fewer shootings, please!

• Note: You’ll notice no links this time, which is unusual for me when I’m talking about specific stories or videos, but I’m exhausted as I prepare this for the blog, and more than a little of it is because of how many stories and videos on the whole situation I’ve watched/read over the past week. I need a bit of a re-set. I’ll get back to my usual link craziness next week.