The Sunday Poem

"I don't know why they shot him. He was only helping."

No.

In the face of death—this death, the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis—a manifest and unadulterated rejection is all I have to offer.

No to a world without Alex.

No to the agony and sorrow his parents and all who knew him are suffering right now.

No to our own federal government and its highest officials, spreading lies and hatred about Alex to cover their crimes.

No to the multi-billion dollar social media platforms whose vicious algorithms amplify those lies and stoke that hatred, all to generate more money and power for their billionaire owners.

No to the perversion of federal immigration enforcement into a roaming, masked, politicized, and unaccountable force.

No to a dark and vicious version of America coming into clearer view with the killing of Alex Pretti.

No to yesterday altogether.

Alex Pretti was born in Illinois, and he grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was a Boy Scout. He sang in the Green Bay Choir. At Preble High School, Alex played football and baseball, and he ran track. He was in the high school musical, too.

In their beautiful public statement after the killing of their son, Alex’s family told us he was “kindhearted.” A good boy. He grew up to become an ICU nurse at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. He was the kind of man who believed that his life should mean service to others. Some people are just made that way.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset," Alex’s father, Michael Pretti, said. "He felt that doing the protesting was a way to express that, you know, his care for others."

On the street where Alex was killed, another woman, who has chosen anonymity at this point, stood a few feet away. She saw the whole thing. In an affidavitt, this witness recognized in those few terrible seconds what so many others saw in Alex throughout his life: “I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping.”

Out of the bottomless, unimaginable grief that Michael Pretti and all who loved Alex are going through, you can still sense their pride in him.

“I do not throw around the hero term lightly,” Michael said of his son. “However his last thought and act was to protect a woman…He was a good man.”

So our first task is to remember Alex Pretti as he was, as his family and many, many others knew him to be. This is our first “yes”—a commitment to telling the truth about Alex in the face of the lies that are and will continue to be told by this administration and its army of MAGA trolls. Yes, always, to the discipline of telling the truth in this country.

For Alex Pretti is not only his parents’ son. In our American democracy down through the generations, we are meant to be one another’s people. We are meant to recognize a fellow citizen as being in a special relationship with us, not as a stranger to be dismissed or ignored, but as our civic kin—someone whose life places a claim on our conscience. Of course we have never fully lived up to that democratic ideal. But visitors who come here from other countries still see it in us. That plain, quiet solidarity is what we are trying to preserve, what we must rescue from Donald Trump’s viciousness and weaponized, polarizing lies.

If we allow the state under Trump to turn Alex Pretti into a caricature—“gunman,” “threat,” “domestic terrorist” or whatever word makes their killing of this good man feel justified, legitimate—then we accept a politics that severs the national family into those who are protected by Trumpism and the rest of us: disfavored and disposable.

So we say his name plainly. We say what he did plainly. We say what was done to him plainly. Not because our words can redeem his blood, but because the lies the government is telling about Alex Pretti are a second violence upon him. Our silence would be a third.

There is no ending that makes this right. There is only the harder vow, the strenuous “yes”—to carry the dead truthfully. To insist on accountability. To stand with the brutalized, the beaten, the kidnapped, the killed—and to refuse, in Alex’s name, to cease our struggle to preserve our democracy as we have known it for generations.

Honor requires nothing less.

Our poem this week is about the loss of a child. It is by the Irish poet Eavan Boland and it is about a baby who was killed in a 1974 car bombing by the Ulster Volunteer Force in Dublin, during the “Troubles,” as the conflict in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics was called.

Child of Our Time

by Eavan Boland

Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder,
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.

We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhymes for your sleep
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.

To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

—Terry