I work in education. Several times a year, we have to practice “lockdown drills”. For those of you who are not in the business, we’re practicing for the nightmare scenario in which there is an armed individual in the building. The details aren’t important. The point is that we are expected to lock our doors and practice pretending that we’re not there. We’ve done it often enough that, once we’ve received an “all clear”, there’s a little ritual we do: The students (who are high schoolers) spend ten or fifteen minutes reacting to the idea of having to prepare for such a grim eventuality. Students tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, you have the kids who express a fatalist attitude. “If someone comes in here with a gun, we’re all dead anyway. What’s the point of this? What’s locking the door supposed to do? They’ll just shoot the lock!”
On the other hand, we have our junior John McClains. They’ll describe in granular detail the amazing feats of strength, skill, and agility they would perform in the case of a school shooting. “Man, I’d climb up into the drop ceiling, crawl over to the perp, drop down behind the guy, and snap his neck before he even knew I was there!”
Early in this most recent school year, however, following a lockdown drill, a student took me by surprise by not falling into either one of the above categories. Instead, they just looked at me and said something I’ll never forget: “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”
They were right, of course. That’s not what was surprising. What was surprising was the clarity of the statement. The other kids aren’t wrong for reacting the way they do. Confronting the possibility of violent death is difficult at the best of times. Having to do it in school, in front of everybody, as part of a regular school activity? That’s even harder. It’s far easier to avoid looking directly at the problem and deflect through performative nihilism or heroism.
But this student didn’t do those things. They looked unflinchingly at the problem, at what it implied about the world we live in, and diagnosed it: We shouldn’t have to live like this.
It’s obvious that “this” can be applied broadly, beyond the specific case of lockdown drills. There are many other conditions in the world that we shouldn’t have to tolerate, but we do because it is part of The Way Things Are. These things have become such a commonplace feature of the world we live in that questioning them is viewed as a waste of time and effort. We’re embracing the same fatalistic helplessness as many of my students after a lockdown.
What are some of the things that we shouldn’t have to tolerate? Medical bankruptcy comes to mind. Not only shouldn’t health care be behind a paywall, the very idea that people can come to financial ruin because of something that not only happened to them through no fault of their own, but was also essential to their continued flourishing and/or existence should outrage all of us. You took an ambulance? Couldn’t you have just driven yourself to the hospital? Or walked?
How about homelessness? There are actual human beings, in the richest country in the world, who are sleeping on the street tonight. They are at the mercy of the elements, vulnerable to chance. Why? Because they don’t have sufficient green pieces of paper? Because society tells us that people with addiction, mental illness, or who otherwise don’t conform to what we consider “normal” don’t deserve shelter? Have you tried not having PTSD? Have you considered getting a job?
And that’s just the basic stuff. We also shouldn’t have to tolerate politicians who use scapegoats to direct public outrage against vulnerable people. We shouldn’t have to tolerate armed and masked government agents in our streets. We shouldn’t have to tolerate corruption at the highest level. We shouldn’t have to tolerate an Attorney General who protects child molesters. We shouldn’t have to tolerate an embarrassing conman who forces the world to participate in his personal psychodrama.
I say the above at the risk of alienating some readers. My examples are drawn from current events in the United States. They date-stamp this essay, making it less timeless and universal in its scope. But the things that are happening right now, in early 2026, deserve attention because there is real harm. There are powerful people in the world who are making things worse at scale, in addition to the systemic harms that are always running in the background. We shouldn’t have to accept either of these things, but the more immediate harm must be addressed up front.
The mention of “masked agents” brings us to what’s been happening in Minneapolis over the last few months. Anyone who has been following the news should know what’s been happening. The Trump administration, in an effort to perform strength by increasing the deportations of undocumented immigrants, has empowered ICE to round people up for detention, in many cases regardless of their actual immigration status.
The people of Minneapolis understand that they shouldn’t have to live like this. And they aren’t accepting The Way Things Are. They are confronting the agents of ICE and CBP as trained observers. They are filming ICE and CBP agents at work. They are protecting their neighbors by making people aware of what’s going on, honking their horns, blowing whistles, and refusing to let the masked agents in unmarked vehicles work anonymously.
And they are doing it at enormous personal risk. By this point, everyone knows the names of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two individuals who stood up to ICE and CBP, refused to turn away from the suffering of others, and paid with their lives. Renee Good was shot three times in the face by an ICE agent because she had stopped in the middle of the street in the middle of a raid. Alex Pretti was shot ten times in the back, after being disarmed by CPB agents. Not only were they killed, they were defamed by members of the Trump administration. They were called “domestic terrorists”. They were accused of attempting to kill the agents who took their lives. Of course, the footage taken from dozens of angles quickly revealed the truth: That neither Good nor Pretti posed a threat to anyone. They were simply trying to mitigate the harm the Trump administration has unleashed on a vulnerable population.
This is only one example of a profound injustice that ordinary people have decided not to tolerate. There are others, at home and abroad. The people of Minnesota provide an example of resistance and we would do well to heed it. Any act of resistance to injustice of any kind has to begin with the recognition that the status quo is untenable. It’s tempting to choose the path of apathy, telling ourselves that resistance is useless. It’s also tempting to believe that only through the extraordinary action of extraordinary people is resistance possible. Alex Pretti and Renee Good show otherwise. So do the countless individuals throughout the United States who are standing up to ICE and CBP every single day, not by being action heroes, but by acting collectively. There are always more of us than there are of them. That’s our power. It’s worth recognizing that standing up involves personal risk, but a better world is worth fighting for. We shouldn’t have to live like this.
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