The stars and stripes forever?

While Donald Trump casts covetous eyes on Canada, Greenland, Venezuela and Panama he may be about to lose his own country.

In just under six months the United States celebrates its Semiquincentennial, but will it make it that far? I hope I'm wrong but it feels like something existential has shifted after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Trump's arrest and effective kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife divided opinion but, as Nicolás Maduro was hardly universally loved and admired, Americans seemed disposed to see how it panned out. 

This latest incident, however, involving an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officer, feels potentially explosive. The City Mayor, Jacob Frey, publicly calling ICE's self-defence excuse "bullshit" and telling them to "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" expressed a level of popular anger and disgust which feels new and dangerous for the continued unity of the United States.

Illinois Congresswoman, Robin Kelly, has just announced plans to file articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, on Thursday claiming she, "has turned ICE into a rogue force, violating the Constitution, tearing families apart, and leaving death in her wake". It may be no exaggeration to say that it could end in more than a war of words, it might conceivably lead to a shooting war, for the third time in the country's relatively short history. 

It feels, admittedly from a distance of thousands of miles, as if the US is a powder-keg waiting for a spark to ignite it. Whether the tragic death of Renee Good will provide that spark is unclear right now but the sense of shock and outrage is palpable even from afar off. What makes the situation more visceral is that she was shot only about a mile from where George Floyd was killed by a serving police officer in 2020. 

The first shot fired at the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19th 1775, which sparked the American Revolutionary War, was described by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem, Concord Hymn, as "the shot heard 'round the world". Could the three shots fired at Renee Good in her car in Minneapolis on Wednesday, one of which was fatal, prove to be similarly cataclysmic?

As Mark Twain observed, “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

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