DadHD Brain

I am not writing this because I love politics.

I don’t.

Honestly, before 2020, politics was one of the last things on my mind. I had my own life, my own family, my own responsibilities, my own chaos.

But this does not feel like politics anymore.

Not in the way people usually mean it.

This is not about Republican or Democrat.

This is about right and wrong.

It is about who gets treated like a person.
Who gets dignity.
Who gets patience.
Who gets the benefit of the doubt.
Who gets to feel safe in their own home, their own school, their own country.

And when politics becomes a conversation about who deserves safety, who deserves dignity, who belongs here, and whose rights matter more, then it becomes something else.

It becomes ethics.

And when politics turns into ethics, I can’t pretend silence is neutral.

Today, I feel terrified.

And I’m done pretending that’s irrational.

Not panicked.
Not hysterical.
Not “too online.”

Terrified.

Because I still can’t stop thinking about Liam Conejo Ramos.

He was five years old when he was detained alongside his father in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. In the photo that spread everywhere, he’s wearing a blue floppy-eared hat and a Spider-Man backpack.

The kind of backpack a kid picks because he wants to feel brave.

The kind of hat a kid wears because someone who loves him thought it looked cute, or warm, or both.

He didn’t choose to be in that moment.

He didn’t choose to become something people argue about.

He was just a little boy who woke up expecting a normal day and ended up in a situation no child should have to understand.

And I hate that I can’t unsee it.

Because I can’t not see my son in him.

It isn’t just the backpack.
It isn’t just the little kid clothes.
It isn’t even the fact that he was five.

It’s the look.

That scared, frozen look kids get when the world suddenly feels too big and they’re trying to figure out whether the adults around them are still safe.

I’ve seen that look on my son’s face when he wakes up from a nightmare.

I saw it before his first roller coaster, when he was trying so hard to be brave and didn’t know if he could.

And that’s what keeps wrecking me.

A child with that look should be comforted. Protected. Held close.

Not turned into a symbol of enforcement.
Not pulled into the machinery of politics.
Not treated like collateral in the name of “security.”

And Liam’s story is not the only one sitting heavy with me.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza was eleven years old.

Eleven is still cartoons and inside jokes and asking for snacks five minutes after dinner.

Eleven is not supposed to mean carrying fear about whether your family belongs here, or what other kids might say to you about it.

Her mother said Jocelynn was bullied with threats tied to ICE and deportation.

No child should have to translate adult politics into personal fear like that.

No child should feel like the world is closing in before they’ve even had a chance to grow into it.

Renée Nicole Good was a mother.

A person with routines.
A person with people who knew her voice.
A person someone expected to hear from again.

She was in her car when she was shot during a federal immigration operation.

There are reports, investigations, explanations, and arguments about what happened.

But underneath all of that is something simpler:

Someone woke up that day and did not come home.

Somewhere, there are kids who went to school expecting to tell their mom about their day later.

Something small.
Something funny.
Something that mattered to them.

And they didn’t get to.

Not that day.
Not the next day.
Not ever again.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse.

The kind of job where you spend your days trying to keep people alive when everything is already going wrong.

The kind of job where you walk into chaos and try to steady it.

He was killed during a confrontation involving federal agents tied to immigration enforcement.

A person trained to save lives, caught in a moment where life was not protected.

These are not statistics.

They are not talking points.

They are not examples to win an argument.

They are people whose lives stopped, and families who now have to figure out how to keep going.

And somehow, we are expected to absorb all of this, process it quickly, and move on to the next headline like it didn’t mean anything.

But it does mean something.

That is what scares me most.

Not one headline.
Not one incident.
Not one policy.

The accumulation.

The raid.
The photo.
The shooting.
The child afraid at school.
The family separated.
The official statement.
The court fight.
The new policy.
The casual cruelty.
The shrug afterward.

One thing at a time, people say, “Well, that’s just one case.”

But a country does not lose its conscience all at once.

It gives it away one inch at a time.

And now we are hearing about policy shifts that would expand execution methods like firing squads and push to make the death penalty faster.

That does not mean it happens everywhere tomorrow.

But it means something when those conversations start becoming normal.

It feels like another small door opening.

Another guardrail loosening.

Another reminder that cruelty does not always announce itself as cruelty.

Sometimes it shows up dressed as order.
As justice.
As efficiency.
As security.

And maybe each piece can be explained on its own.

But I am not afraid of one piece.

I am afraid of the pattern.

I am afraid of what we are learning to accept.

And I can’t stop thinking about something else.

Everything we were taught about right and wrong used to feel settled. Agreed on. Obvious.

Be fair.
Don’t bully people.
Treat people the way you want to be treated.
Everyone deserves rights.
Everyone deserves dignity.

I thought we were all hearing the same lesson.

But now I catch myself wondering if some kids were sitting in those same classrooms thinking, that’s dumb.

Thinking, other people having rights somehow takes something away from me.

Thinking, one day they’ll see.

And maybe that is part of what feels so disorienting now.

Not just that the lines are being crossed.

But that some people may have been waiting for the chance to cross them.

And something else has been sitting heavy with me.

We have spent years arguing about guns in this country.

About rights.
About self-defense.
About what it means to be “a good guy with a gun.”

I have watched people defend armed civilians standing in the middle of protests with rifles across their chests. I have watched them say that carrying a weapon does not automatically make someone a threat. That a person still has rights. That we need the full context before deciding what happened.

And honestly, I agree with that standard.

I do not think someone should be executed in the street because they are armed.

I do not think fear alone should be enough to erase due process.

I do not think the government should get to decide, in a flash, that a person’s life is over unless there is no other possible choice.

But that is why the reaction to Alex Pretti has been so hard to swallow.

Because now, suddenly, some people seem comfortable saying that if he had a gun, that might be enough.

Not if he fired it.
Not if he aimed it.
Not if he was proven to be an immediate threat.

Just if he had one.

And I keep wondering why the standard changes.

Why one armed person at a protest is framed as complicated, brave, or misunderstood, while another is reduced to a threat before the facts are even fully known.

Why some people get patience.
Why some people get context.
Why some people get the benefit of the doubt.

And others get a sentence written over their body after they are already gone.

I am not saying every situation is the same.

I am saying our humanity should not depend on whose protest we agree with.

Because if dignity only applies when we approve of the person standing in front of us, then it was never dignity.

It was permission.
It was preference.
And that is a dangerous thing to build justice on.

People say “it’s a free country.”

But freedom does not feel real when some families are forced to live in fear of the knock, the raid, the detention center, the viral photo, the officer, the mistake, the escalation.

Freedom does not feel real when children are absorbing adult terror before they even understand the words being used around them.

And I keep thinking about my own kids.

My kids are Contreras.

I am proud of that name.

But I would be lying if I said I haven’t thought about how quickly this country decides who gets patience and who gets suspicion. Who gets presumed innocent and who gets treated like a problem to be solved.

That is a terrifying thing to admit.

But maybe part of being a father is refusing to look away from the world my children are inheriting.

I don’t want to raise my kids to be afraid of everything.

But I also don’t want to teach them that safety means silence.

I don’t want them to grow up thinking kindness is weakness, or that empathy or compassion is somehow less serious than power.

And I do not want them to look back one day and see that their father chose comfort over conscience.

Because silence in moments like these is not neutral.

Sometimes silence is a privilege.

And I do not want to use mine that way.

I may not know how to fix everything.

I don’t have a perfect answer.

But when the question becomes who gets treated like a person, I will step in any day.

Even if my voice shakes.

Even if I don’t say it perfectly.

Even if someone tells me I should have stayed out of politics.

Because this is not just politics to me.

This is about whether fear gets to become normal.

Whether cruelty gets to become order.

Whether children get to become collateral.

Whether death gets to become efficiency.

Whether dignity depends on approval.

And whether my kids see me choosing silence just because speaking up made me uncomfortable.

I just know this:

When a five-year-old in a Spider-Man backpack looks scared, something in us should still break.

When an eleven-year-old carries fear until she cannot carry it anymore, something in us should still break.

When people die during operations carried out in our name, something in us should still break.

And if it doesn’t, then maybe that is the thing I’m most afraid of.

Rest in peace, Jocelynn.
Rest in peace, Renée.
Rest in peace, Alex.

Protect Liam.

Protect all our kids.