Steven LaChance Blog

I went quiet for a few days this week on purpose. Not because I did not care, and not because I did not have something to say, but because I needed to think before responding to what I was seeing. Some moments do not need more noise. They need clarity.

There are moments lately when I have felt ashamed to be alive during these times, ashamed to be tied to them, ashamed by what we tolerate and how quickly we move on. History does not ask for our consent. We inherit it. We live inside it. We are connected to it whether we want to be or not.

I watched the reactions roll in after the murders of two citizens on the streets of Minneapolis, and I knew immediately this was not the moment to say too much. So I said what needed to be said, and then I stopped talking long enough to observe how quickly the country moved into familiar patterns.

Then Joe Biden released a statement that included the line, “We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street.”

I sat with his words for a moment. They were not true. What he was saying was not the reality of the United States at all.

We are a nation that has gunned people down in the street. We are a nation that has allowed our fellow citizens to be brutalized for exercising their rights. We are a nation that has trampled the Fourth Amendment and tolerated it. Not just now. Not just recently. Repeatedly. Throughout our history.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a factual one.

I do not have to stretch history to make this point. I remember watching Rodney King being beaten on television. I remember the footage. I remember thinking there was no way anyone could deny what we were seeing. I remember the verdict. I remember how quickly the country explained it away and moved on.

George Floyd did not happen in the distant past. It happened in front of all of us. In real time. A man was killed in the street while pleading for his life, calling for his mother, and the entire world watched. And still, here we are, pretending this is not who we are.

If anyone wants to argue that this is new, they are not arguing with opinion. They are arguing with history.

Slavery was protected by law and upheld by presidents. Indigenous removal was policy, not accident. Lynchings were public events. Labor organizers were beaten and killed. Civil rights protestors were met with dogs, batons, and fire hoses. Students were shot at Kent State. These are not footnotes. They are the record.

So when we say, “This is not who we are,” what we really mean is, “This is not how we want to see ourselves.” Those are not the same thing. Moral posturing rings thin when it is not paired with honest memory.

The United States is an ultra-violent nation. It always has been. We train children in classrooms how to survive mass shootings because it happens. That alone should end the argument.

What makes this moment different is not the violence. It is the direction.

This is a lean into authoritarianism. Force is being justified as order, dissent is being treated as danger, and accountability is starting to feel optional. History has seen this before. It never begins with extremes. It begins when people tell themselves it will not go any further.

I say all of this knowing there is something better in us too. I have seen it, even when it feels buried under fear and exhaustion. It shows up in people who refuse to look away, who refuse to excuse cruelty, even when it would be easier to do so. That part of us has always existed alongside the worst of our history. It does not erase it, and it does not excuse it, but it reminds me that choice still matters.

The outrage in this moment is justified. It should be. But outrage is not something you let out and then forget about. That is the part we always get wrong. We get upset. We grieve. We react. And then, slowly, it fades. It is almost like we go back to sleep until the next horror arrives and jolts us awake again. That cycle is part of the problem. This time needs to be different. This time we need to wake the fuck up and actually do the work to fix this.

I went quiet for a reason. History will not remember us for our intentions. It will remember us for what we did when it mattered. I had to wrestle with the truth of our violent past as a nation while confronting the violence of our present, because you cannot examine one while pretending the other does not exist.