I don't talk about politics.

If you've followed me for any length of time, you know this. I've built entire communities around the explicit rule: no politics, no religion, no debates that divide us. I've believed that my job as a writer is to create spaces where humans can connect across those lines, not deepen the trenches.

I'm breaking that rule today.

Two days ago, I watched a woman named Renee Good get shot in the face by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. I watched it on my computer, scrolling Facebook. I thought it was just another piece of content. I flinched so hard my hand flew to my mouth. I started crying before I even understood what I'd seen.

She was a legal observer. She was a volunteer and a mother. She was driving away, not toward, the officers when one of them fired through her window. Then the administration called her a terrorist, claimed she tried to run over an officer, and praised the shooter. The videos show this is a lie. They released the lie anyway.

I am not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I belong to neither party. I belong to humanity. And right now, humanity is losing.

I'm writing this as a wife.

My husband is Hispanic. Since this administration took office, I've watched something happen to him that terrifies me more than any policy. The man I married (someone who is warm, funny, and generous) is disappearing under the weight of what it means to be brown in America right now. He's glued to his phone, afraid to miss any news. I told him not to leave our county without someone he trusts beside him. He knew I was right.

The fear has settled into our home like carbon monoxide... odorless, invisible, and poisoning everything slowly. What's breaking isn't really about us at all. It's about living under a government that looks at my husband and sees a target.

This is what they don't show you in the headlines. Not just the raids and the deportations and the women shot in their cars. But the marriages straining, the terrified families, the mental health collapsing. The millions of households where good people are reaching for each other and missing because fear has overtaken our country.

I'm writing this as a journalist.

I work for a small newspaper in rural Utah. I'm trained to report facts, to stay neutral, to present both sides. But there are not two sides to shooting an unarmed woman in the face. There are not two sides to lying about it afterward. There are not two sides to using federal power to terrorize communities while the administration's family starts cryptocurrency ventures and seizes foreign oil.

Some things are just wrong. Calling them wrong isn't partisan. It's human.

I'm writing this as a woman who is afraid.

I hesitated to write this piece. Not because I might lose readers, though I might. Not because my family might disagree, though they might. But because I watched what happened to Renee Good and thought: what if some authority figure sees my post, labels me difficult, runs into me in public, and decides I'm a threat?

That fear is not irrational. It's not anxiety. It's the reasonable conclusion of watching a woman be murdered on camera while her killers get promoted and she gets called a terrorist.

I'm writing this anyway.

Because silence feels like complicity. Because our boat is sinking and someone needs to say it out loud. Because I refuse to be invisible while others fight on the front lines. Because my whole life's work has been about radical resilience: turning wounds into wisdom, showing up as your whole self even when it's terrifying, believing that authentic truth-telling can change things.

This is me, showing up.

I don't know what comes next. I don't have policy solutions or a candidate to endorse or a neat conclusion that makes this feel okay. 

All I have is this: Humans matter. Not colors or borders or wealth or status or party affiliation. Humans. When did we stop choosing life and love over hate? When did we decide that some people are acceptable losses? When did we let fear make us strangers to each other... in our country, in our communities, in our own homes?

I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to stay human with me.

That's all I've got.