The cost of pretending everything has two sides
It happened in the middle of an ordinary day. Traffic, phones buzzing, people half paying attention the way we all do now.
Then a video surfaces. A car. A pause. Gunfire through glass. More gunfire through an open window. The details arrive quietly at first, then they refuse to leave.
Renee Nicole Good. Thirty-seven. A mother of a six-year old. Who will now grow up with a sudden hole where certainty used to be.
What follows is always predictable.
The coverage widens, not to understand what happened, but to balance it. Language starts doing that strange softening thing.
Context is summoned like a ritual. Someone mentions fear. Someone else mentions procedure. The frame shifts away from the moment itself and toward an abstract argument about sides, as if reality were a debate stage and not a street where a life ended.
Bothsideism pretends to be maturity.
Let’s put up fairness facade, restraint, as professionalism. But what it actually does is flatten moral terrain until nothing has edges anymore.
When every act must be counterweighted by an opposing perspective, power dissolves into opinion. Violence becomes a disagreement. Accountability becomes optional. The mechanics are simple. If you never name wrong clearly, you never have to confront who benefits from it.
We claim to value truth, yet we outsource our judgment to framing. We say facts matter, but only after they have been padded with qualifiers. Why?
The person with the gun and the person trying to leave are treated as equivalent narrative units, even though one holds state power and the other holds nothing but the hope of getting home.
Enough with the neutral face.
There is a quieter way to look at this. You start by staying with what is visible.
A woman was killed while trying to drive away. Multiple shots were fired to ensure she did not survive.
No slogan improves that. No opposing argument balances it. Clarity is not extremism. It is simply the willingness to stop pretending that every moment in public life is a seminar. Some moments are not debates. They are facts. And facts, when we allow ourselves to see them, still know how to stand on their own.
Rest in peace. And power.