Awake to What Matters

It’s the Nazi era. You see SS soldiers rounding people up, neighbours disappearing from streets, families torn apart, and the world around you is silent or complicit. What do you do? Do you look away? Do you tell yourself it’s not your problem? Or do you feel the weight of what’s happening, the human cost, and let it reach you?

This blog post is different. I normally write about inner life, the moments where meaning quietly grows or falls away, not about the headlines. But I couldn’t let the shooting in Minneapolis just pass by while I pretended it didn’t matter. I know you read this blog not to escape the messiness of the world, but to make sense of it. And here’s the thing: some events aren’t “out there”. They seep into who we are, how we think about justice, safety, and belonging.

On January 24th Minneapolis experienced a fatal shooting by federal immigration agents. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was killed by Border Patrol agents during an enforcement operation that had already drawn intense local scrutiny and protests. This happened amid a larger surge of federal immigration enforcement dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” during which another citizen, Renée Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier in January, a shooting that itself sparked protests and outrage.

What this really means

Here’s what I want you to see first: this isn’t just a policy dispute or another headline. It’s a crack in the shared sense of safety and trust that communities place in institutions meant to protect them.

We are conditioned to separate “personal life” from “public events,” as if there’s a wall between them. But there isn’t. What a community experiences, what we witness, what we feel outraged by, what we grieve, enters the human interior. It changes how we see each other and how we trust the systems around us.

When you see another human killed in controversial circumstances, especially someone described as a caregiver, a neighbour, a human with a life and relationships, there’s an immediate emotional landmine that goes off inside most of us.

You don’t have to know the person. You don’t have to be from Minneapolis. You don’t even have to live in the U.S.

It fractures trust. Trust isn’t a buzzword here. It’s the emotional glue that holds shared life together. Once it cracks, people start to see every interaction through the lens of whether they feel seen or dismissed.

That’s why people protested, not just in Minneapolis, but across cities: because the shared experience of a community has turned into something raw that can’t be soothed by another press release or defensive talking point.

History doesn’t leave us a choice

Remember this phrase: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. It’s not just a clever line, it’s a warning rooted in observation.

Look back at other moments when state power confronted citizens, not in theory, but face to face.

• In the Civil Rights era, police violence against peaceful protestors cracked open national consciousness because it was undeniable on film and in people’s memories.

  
  

• In 1943, during World War II, Jewish residents in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against Nazi forces in an act of resistance that became a lasting testament to human defiance in the face of oppressive, unaccountable state violence.

  
  

• In 2020, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis wasn’t just a local tragedy; it became a global point of reckoning because it tapped into a deeper shared experience of injustice.

  
  

• In other parts of the world, when authorities use force without transparent accountability, cycles of protest, distrust, and conflict tend to rise rather than settle.

Those are not random occurrences. They are patterns where societies confront the question: What does it mean to protect people, not just control them?

When public institutions fail to answer that question with clarity, people default to their own sense-making. They fill in the gaps not with indifference but with emotion, narrative, fear, and grief.

What we can learn from this

This is the part I want to be most clear about, because reflection without takeaway is just rumination.

1. Learn how to sit with discomfort | Most of us spend so much of life trying to avoid discomfort: scrolling past, changing the topic, distracting ourselves. But discomfort is often an alarm, not a detour. It’s the body and mind’s way of saying: something matters here. And ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, it just buries it in the subconscious, where it grows into cynicism or numbness.

2. Learn to evaluate systems, not narratives | There’s a difference between what is said and what can be verified. You don’t have to choose sides; you have to choose evidence over rhetoric. Transparency and accountability aren’t political terms, they’re conditions for trust. When an institution’s narrative consistently conflicts with what people can see with their own eyes, the result is not skepticism alone, it’s distrust.

3. Learn that grief is not weakness | We often treat grief as something to “get over,” like a task completed. But grief is a signal that something in us has been moved or wounded. When a community grieves a life that was taken in contested circumstances, that grief is a collective effort of making sense of tragic events, not hysteria.

4. Learn to hold complexity | Our culture pushes simplification: good versus bad, right versus wrong. But real life, especially in moments of conflict and loss, is rarely binary. Acknowledging uncertainty, sitting with ambiguity are some of the most mature cognitive and emotional skills a person can cultivate.

Why this matters to you

When events like the Minneapolis shootings happen, the instinct is either to look away or to pick a side in a debate. But what this moment asks of us is deeper: to examine how we relate to truth, to one another, and to our own inner sense of justice and safety.

These situations won’t just fade into the background of our lives. They shape how we think about authority, fairness, and empathy. They influence how we connect with each other, how we carry grief, how we forgive, how we remember.

We can choose to respond with fear OR with thoughtful engagement. We can choose to let these moments make us smaller OR to let them stretch our capacity for reflection, compassion, and discernment.

That’s not easy. But avoiding the conversations, resting in the chaos or accepting cruelty, are deffinitely not the way to go.

'Till next time...