What will we be celebrating this year with the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding document?

On July 4, 1776 Congress ratified, by unanimous vote, our Declaration of Independence. That document says the powers of our government will be organized in such form as will seem to the people who constitute that government the most likely “to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

We no longer feel safe in our nation. We no longer feel happy.

On Jan. 7, a masked federal agent gunned down a woman in her car as she drove away. Several of her Minneapolis neighbors filmed the murder.

If you haven’t looked at the videos, you can view the one filmed by bystander Caitlin Callenson here.

Our president lied, posting that the woman who was shot “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

Anyone who looks at the videos can see this simply is not true. Jonathan Ross, identified later by reputable news media as the agent who did the shooting, was not in the hospital. He was not run over.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a post on social media, described the woman who was shot as “one of these violent rioters [who] weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”

The post went on, “An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.”

As Americans, while the United States still has a free press, each of us has a choice to make. Will we believe accounts posted by Donald Trump and his administration when we can see with our own eyes that they are not true? Or will we seek accounts from independent news sources — several sources are better than just one — that hue to reality?

The future of our democracy depends on citizens willing to seek the truth.

The day of the fatal shooting, we learned from the Minnesota Star and Tribune, in a story written by Paul Walsh and Jeff Day, that the victim was 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. Walsh and Gray had talked to her mother, Donna Ganger, and also to the father of her late husband.

Good was an award-winning poet, they reported, earning an English degree in 2020 from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She was an American citizen.

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mother said. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

Good had been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at age 36, the Minnesota Newspaper reported. Macklin’s father, Timmy Ray Macklin Sr., was shocked to hear the news that Good had been shot and killed.

He said Good and his son had a child who is now 6 years old. “There’s nobody else in his life,” Macklin said of the 6-year-old boy. “I’ll drive. I’ll fly. To come and get my grandchild.” Macklin added that Good had two additional children.

On Jan. 9, we learned from an Associated Press story by Michael Biesecker and Jim Mustian, who talked to the man Good had been married to before Macklin. Her ex-husband, with whom she had two children, now ages 12 and 15, said that Good was a devoted Christian, citing her mission work, who had primarily been a stay-at-home mom in recent years. He said he never knew her to participate in a protest of any kind.

On Jan. 9, Becca Good, Good’s wife, released a statement to Minnesota Public Radio, saying, “If you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind. In fact, kindness radiated out of her.”

Becca Good went on to say the family had recently moved to Minnesota to make a better life for themselves and had found “a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.”

She went on, “We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine.

“On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.

“Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.”

None of this squares with the Trump administration account.

Faced with reality, with what everyone can see in the videos, Trump and his followers are doubling down on the lies.

On Jan. 8, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said, “The deadly incident that took place in Minnesota yesterday occurred as a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country, where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”

The agents were not under attack when Good was shot. Her car looks to be blocking the road when a masked armed man gets out of his truck and yells, “Get out of the fucking car,” then grabs the handle of her locked door and reaches through the window. As she slowly starts to drive away, another armed masked man shoots her. Her car careens and crashes into cars parked by the curb.

Also on Jan. 8, Vice President JD Vance said of Good’s shooting, “This was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people.”

In short, he made the victim into the villain.

He went on to scold the media for most of the coverage, calling it “an absolute disgrace.”

Vance then asserted — with no facts to back up his claims — that Good was “there to interfere with the legitimate law enforcement operation of the the United states of America,” that she “is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their jobs.”

Vance said the media “ought to tell the truth that a group of leftwing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the president of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do.”

Vance concluded by scolding the media for “lying about this attack.” He said of Good, whom he never called by her name — referring to her only as “this woman”: “She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself.”

Vance concluded, “Everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law-enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

When The New York Times pressed Trump about his take on the ICE shooting, he said of Good, “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”

A Times analysis of footage from three camera angles showed the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.

On Jan. 9, the White House’s official Rapid Response X account posted a video taken by Ross, documenting his exchange with Good and her passenger, presumably Becca Good. Renee Good speaks to Ross from the driver’s seat, saying, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” She repeats her only words to him as he walks alongside her car: “I’m not mad at you.”

The passenger, who is outside the car, taking video of Ross on her phone, speaks with him before getting back in the car — telling him to show his face, that the car’s plates won’t be changed “when you come to talk to us later,” that she’s a U.S citizen and veteran. She asks, “You want to come at us? I say, go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

After Ross shoots Good, he says, “Fucking bitch” just before the crash.

Beyond the horror of the shooting itself are the lies that Trump and his administration are perpetrating about it.

Five-and-a-half years ago, a half-mile away in Minneapolis, George Floyd was murdered at the hands of a police officer. As with the videos from Jan. 7, people could see Floyd being murdered, breathing his last breath.

What if our president at the time had said, despite what we could actually see, that the officers had acted in self-defense killing Floyd? That Floyd was not the victim, but the villain?

The problem with a president and his followers lying arises when people believe those lies. Followers of Trump stormed our nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 because they believed his lies that the election was stolen. They tried to interfere with a cornerstone of our democracy, the smooth transition of power based on the will of the people.

Trump then pardoned his followers who had been lawfully arrested and convicted by our system of justice. With a carte blanche from the United States Supreme Court and no resistance from Congress, Trump has expanded executive powers beyond the checks and balances set out in our Constitution.

It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a progressive, your duty to seek the truth transcends party allegiance and political philosophy.

This is not a problem just for Minneapolis or for Minnesota. This is a problem across the United States, including here at home.

At a rally held in Albany on Jan. 8, our state senator, Patricia Fahy, and our assemblywoman, Gabriella Romero, pushed legislation they have crafted to try to protect New Yorkers from the savagery of current ICE operations.

At that rally, Romero mentioned Guilderland schoolchildren witnessing an ICE arrest, which she described as a kidnapping. We called her office to learn details about the June arrest close to a school-bus stop near Carman Road.

Two people were detained after the traffic stop, taken into custody by ICE. Romero issued a statement at the time, saying, “Children who witnessed the arrest have now experienced this trauma. I frequently receive calls urging me to take action to protect our immigrant neighbors and friends. This is not going to get any better. The reality is that families are being torn apart, and workers are being taken from businesses, which is destabilizing our local economy.”

As Romero predicted, it has not gotten any better; it has gotten worse — far worse. And, while it is fair in a democratic society to have differing views on immigration and even on enforcement, what is not tolerable is to lie about what is happening.

We support the four bills that the Albany crowd was rallying for on Jan. 9, but that legislation, which will offer some cover for New Yorkers — forbidding masks on ICE agents; requiring the state to post data on ICE actions across New York; regulating disclosure of information on immigration status; and establishing a right of action for the deprivation of constitutional rights —  won’t solve the root of the problem.

At a campaign rally in Iowa in 2016, talking about the loyalty of his supporters, Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

We now are witnessing that reality. Trump is not calling for an investigation into the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, which would be a reasonable response for a president.

Rather, he is asserting what is clearly not true — that Good ran over an agent. She did not. A federal agent stood in a Minneapolis street and shot a woman to death.

The view we have formed of Good from news accounts where reporters have quoted the people who knew her best — her mother, her former husband, the father of her dead husband, her wife who is now a widow — and from the only words she spoke to Ross was that she was not “one of those violent rioters” as Homeland Security labeled her but rather a kind person who as a citizen born and raised in the United States stepped up to try to protect her neighbors.

“We had whistles,” said her widow, Becca Good. “They had guns.”

We see Becca and Renee Good as similar to the members of Guilderland Indivisible who will gather at the Guilderland Public Library on Monday, Jan. 12, to put together whistle kits with instructions about what to do if confronted by ICE. 

The First Amendment of our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble. These days, it takes courage to exercise those rights. You should not be shot for doing so.

Our slender hope for the salvation of our democracy is that, come the mid-term elections, enough voters — even those who had been loyal to Trump — will see the lies for what they are and vote for representatives in Congress that will have the courage to revitalize the legislative branch of our government.

There is a reason Vice President Vance focused on excoriating the press in defending the ICE agent’s shooting of Good — the press remains a means for citizens to ferret out the truth despite what their government wants them to believe.

The irony that we are in the midst of celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation and the great experiment of democracy is, at this time in our history, crushing.

These are the times, now, that try our souls. This is The American Crisis. We must not be sunshine patriots. We must not shrink from our duty as citizens to find the truth and follow through with action.