Steven LaChance Blog

I need to say this from a personal place. I am a writer, and with that comes a responsibility to share things in the most straightforward way possible. Writers are the recorders of history. I would much rather be sharing thoughts on the paranormal than writing this.

Yesterday, when I watched that man die, killed by bullets emptied into his body after he was already down, I was not only seeing the present moment. I was remembering places I have stood where violence crossed from exception into routine. Streets where power learned it could act without restraint, and where people later asked how it happened so quickly.

People like to throw the word Nazi around, and that comparison can feel charged. But the broader truth is that Nazism was a name given to a societal disease, one that has reached every corner of the world at one point or another. In the case of the United States, many times before.

The United States has never been innocent, and it matters to say that plainly. This is not about pointing fingers at history as if it belongs to someone else. All history carries guilt for this kind of aggression against its own people. The United States is no exception. Slavery is an obvious example. So is the civil rights struggle, particularly in the South, where the law itself was used to punish those who sought equality and justice.

These moments are not abstract. We recognize them because we have seen them before. Not as exact repeats, but as familiar shapes. The posture. The confidence. The speed with which force is justified and questions are brushed aside. Recognition is frightening because it collapses distance and brings those past moments forward again. It tells you this is not safely in the past.

When I visited the Anne Frank House, what stayed with me was not a single dramatic moment, but the ordinariness of it all. A young girl trying to live, to think, to hope, while something dangerous closed in around her day by day. She understood that harm does not begin with catastrophe. It begins when fear becomes normal, and when people are asked to accept what once would have been unthinkable.

That is what I felt yesterday. Not panic. Recognition. A quiet, settling understanding. I have spent years hoping I was wrong about where this could lead. I wanted to be wrong. But standing witness means trusting what you see and what you have learned, even when you wish it were not true. Silence is not neutral at moments like this. It is how the ground shifts without anyone noticing until it is already gone.

I do not have all the answers in this moment. But I do know this. We outnumber them. Pressure matters. Letting the world know what is happening in Minneapolis matters. Calling this what it is, a hostile occupation by our own government, matters. This is not a political moment but a moral one.

We demand that our better nature and our shared values rise to meet this terrible moment in our history regardless of politics.