Ad hoc memorial to Renee Good, killed in Minneapolis
Jan 7, 2026, during protest of Immigragtion and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) activity.
RENEE
Good to find God
The video doesn’t show
Her soul escaping up
She left us in the snow
Stained red
Good gone forever
The soul of the goon
Can’t escape
Sold to Lucifer
For sign-up boon
And promises of Greatness
Nothing new here
A people lost their way
Shiny demons leer
Pied piper collecting children
Renee, Poem by Paul Bunge, January 8, 2025
When it is no longer possible to stretch those so very elastic threads of the historical rationale any farther, when an action is manifestly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians resort to the device of "greatness." "Greatness" would appear to exclude the standards of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong. There is no atrocity for which a "great" man can be accounted guilty....
Now I think I understand Spike Lee a little better. A man who can see things 30 years before others take them seriously is going to be an angry man. Watch “Do the Right Thing,” if you can stomach the profanity. Or at least see the clip that Lee has already noted is so similar to recent events (it's disturbing). You will see the complexity, the horror, the drama, the pain, the anger of today. The difference is, nobody marched for a strangled black man in 1989. The pain and the anger and the confusion of the violence and injustice around him, Lee carried by himself. Or carried it with a whole lot of other black men and women, most of whom did not have the focus or the understanding or the clarity or the charisma to make a movie to contain it. And so he was alone.
Thank you, Spike Lee. You were brave enough to focus that anger and that confusion into something real, disguised as something fictional. You were ahead of your time. But what you did perhaps planted a seed somewhere, so that when George Floyd breathed his last in real life, so much like your character Radio Raheem, people knew it was time to say something. Time to throw something. And so you woke the sleepers, made the blind see. Not enough to see clearly perhaps, to know the way forward. But enough to know there is light and a road.
