Christine Flowers: Reaching a conclusion about Renee Good’s killing

It finally dawned on me that the connections we make on social media have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

This is why I never tried online dating.

I know people who found love that way including a few “silver singles” who managed to excavate that one rare diamond from the relationship tar pits — excuse the mixed metaphors — but the internet is more subterfuge than substance.

This column isn’t about that sort of love. It’s about the equally important friendship connections that fill the empty spaces in our hearts.

Social media is quite worthless as a conduit to platonic happiness.

Maybe I’m naïve. I abandoned Twitter/X a while ago, after I received some rather shady email threats because of my writing.

Of course, the same sort of people who issue death threats are the same ones who buy generic dog food for their elderly Labrador, so I’m pretty sure they’re too cheap to actually buy a plane ticket or gas up the car to come after me in person.

I held on to Facebook and some “friends” who I’d never actually met, but who seemed like the kind of people I’d share coffee and chicken soup with, the sort of people who would be kind enough not to point out that I used a dangling participle in this sentence.

They are Catholic like me, so they’d know, but they’d maintain a polite grammatical silence.

I held onto them, even though we disagreed on some political issues, even though they were pro-choice, even though they supported the legalization of pot and even though in some cases, they supported the New York Giants.

I was unable to continue conversations with Dallas fans, however, finding that this was a bridge too far over the Rio Grande for this Philly girl.

But this past week, an ICE agent shot a woman in the face because she disobeyed a traffic order where he yelled at her to “get out of the f*****g car!” and some of the aforementioned “friends” didn’t see this as a crime, much less a tragedy.

A few of them mumbled platitudes about how it was “sad” or “regrettable” that she was killed but that, after all, she had rammed a law enforcement agent with her car so he was justified in making her six-year-old an orphan.

There are a lot of things in life that have shocked me, and I’m no Pollyanna, but this one hurt.

I always tried to take a rather balanced view of the extremists on both sides of the political aisle, giving a bit more charity to my fellow travelers on the right.

And I have won awards for writing about the dangerous job that police officers confront on a daily basis, including one from the National Association of Black Journalists for a piece on the murder of Philly Police Sgt. Robert Wilson, killed on his son’s birthday while trying to disrupt a robbery in progress.

I sometimes get yelled at from police cars with the windows rolled down with officers “thanking” me by name for my support.

I have law enforcement in my family.

And every time I pass by the brass plaque dedicated to the memory of Danny Faulkner, gunned down in cold blood by the racist amateur journalist Wesley Cook, a/k/a Mumia Abu Jamal, I say a prayer and I spit into the wind at the thought of his murderer.

But I’m not blind.

I have seen as many Zapruder videos of what happened this week in Minneapolis as possible, and I talked to law enforcement officers who know about the protocols, and I thought back on the ICE agents that I have known for over 20 years who would never have done anything like this, and I’m convinced that Renee Good was unjustly killed.

I am not a criminal attorney, so I cannot say “murdered.”

I can’t authoritatively discuss the grades of culpability.

What I do know is that shooting a woman in the face, a person who has not aimed her car at you but was in fact turning in the other direction, who was not, in fact, blocking a roadway but had let other cars pass, who was not in fact a “domestic terrorist” is an illegal act.

Sadly for me, there are a lot of people who disagree.

Most of them are not in law enforcement, but they are supporters of this administration’s draconian policies with respect to immigration.

And while I could understand their confusion about whether Kilmar should be deported, and I sympathize with their anger at criminal aliens, I have no stomach for anyone who thinks shooting a mother in the face is an acceptable response to anything in this world.

This article originally appeared in the Delco Times.

Christine Flowers can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.