I’m reading the paper
on a Sunday morning,
coffee going cold,
headline doing that thing
where it pretends to be neutral.
A federal agent shot a man
in Minneapolis.
Thirty-seven.
A citizen.
Videos everywhere.
He’s on the ground.
He’s restrained.
Someone fires anyway.
That’s the scene.
That’s all you need.
Then come the quotes.
Republicans are struggling to respond.
That’s how it’s phrased,
as if the difficulty is emotional,
as if the problem is wording,
not what happened.
They say disturbing.
Floating, careful, clean.
Disturbing how?
Like static on the TV?
Like an awkward Thanksgiving?
Like a policy memo that needs revising?
They don’t say wrong.
They don’t say unacceptable.
They don’t say this cannot happen again.
They say disturbing
and immediately follow it
with lawful arrest,
heated rhetoric,
sanctuary cities,
end game.
Whole paragraphs
built to walk around a body.
One senator says the agents
were just doing their jobs.
Another says the mayor
put them in danger.
Someone else suggests
maybe ICE should leave town
to avoid losing more innocent lives.
No one says
why innocent lives are being lost
in the first place.
They talk about investigations
run by the same people
who fired the shots.
They talk about oversight
without saying independent.
They talk about guns
only to remind you
that this man had one,
even though it was legal,
even though it wasn’t fired,
even though it didn’t save him.
(It’s supposed to, remember?)
Language keeps stepping in
before thought can finish.
By the time you reach the bottom,
the story isn’t about the man anymore.
It’s about party unity.
Midterms.
Optics.
The violence shrinks.
The words grow polite.
And that’s when it hits me.
This isn’t confusion.
This isn’t struggle.
This isn’t even hypocrisy.
It’s fluency.
They know exactly
how to talk about a killing
without ever touching it.
They know which words
lower the temperature
without raising the truth.
They know how to sound concerned
while protecting the thing
that caused the concern.
So yes,
disturbing is the right word
because it lets everyone move on
without admitting
what they’re really afraid of:
Not what happened.
But how clearly we all saw it.
