Good's Dog

I am thinking about Renee Good’s dog because my heart hurts too much to think directly about the totality of her unnecessary death.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good’s dog.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good’s dog because my heart hurts too much think about what happened to Renee Good. Her dog in the backseat of her SUV; her dog looking out the rolled-down window at an ICE agent as he walks around her vehicle, filming with his cell phone; her dog, who we later see alive, in a Reuter’s photo, outside her SUV on the icy pavement next to Renee Good’s partner because Renee Good is dead.

Last week was the first week of Kentucky’s general assembly for 2026. And though nothing much happened outside the filing of bills and adjusting to having no House or Senate galleries for the public, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread. Why? Because in addition to lawmakers returning to Frankfort to fight, yet again, the DEI culture wars, the rolling tsunami of national news — Venezuela, the fifth anniversary of January 6, Renee Good’s execution on a Minneapolis street — is drowning us here in the commonwealth, too.

On Friday night I watched Comment on Kentucky, our weekly political recap, like I always do. It sounded so polite. It sounded so normal. It sounded so distant and sanitized from the 24/7 political dumpster fire we are all, every last one of us, living in.

Ten years ago this month, we bought our house in rural Anderson County. It would be another year and a half before we moved here permanently with our three big dogs, but to-a-person our neighbors welcomed us from the first day with bon fires and open houses and, “Hey, do you have a minute to walk on over here and meet our new grand baby?”

We thought we had arrived in paradise.

We thought we had arrived in paradise because there was proof of that paradise every single day until a billionaire from New York City came down an escalator and changed our lives from there all the way to rural Kentucky.

Because he came down that escalator there would soon be no more neighborhood bonfires.

No more open houses, not even during the holidays.

No more calls to “walk on over here.”

It turns out that a decade of poisonous political rancor — Facebook and Twitter sniping, cable TV talking heads and yard signs and MAGA flags, the joyful cruelty of the president, the Kentucky legislature with their addiction to culture wars and embarrassingly obvious envy of the governor, the decimation of local news, the giant chasm we feel between us and neighbors within walking distance — takes its toll. Even the Republicans out here don’t socialize with all of the other Republicans.

My heart hurts.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good’s dog. Her big black dog with his white-tipped nose staring out from the back window of her SUV the same way my dog — Jack, Jack-o’-Lantern, Lantern of Love — his black snout whitening with age, stares out the back window of my truck, excited for every ten mile drive to town as if it’s the first time he’s ever been to town.

I found Jack at the Lexington Humane Society as a puppy in November 2017, one year into the MAGA presidency that was, even then, already shifting the tectonic plates of our humanity.

A few months earlier, I’d put our elderly yellow lab to sleep at the veterinarian’s office, and since I was sobbing they kindly waved me past the reception desk and out the door. Come back another day, they said, you can pay later.

A week or so later, I was back at the vet’s office, standing in line to pay, when the man behind me, his own big elderly dog at the end of the leash in his hand, said under his breath, “You’re that lady that writes for the paper” and proceeded to tell me what he thought of my politics. He kept on until I turned around and said, “I’m sorry this is taking so long, I put my dog to sleep last week” and suddenly the politics disappeared. How old was my dog, he wanted to know, what happened, boy he was sorry, there’s no friend like a dog, is there?

I was watching Comment on Kentucky on Friday night, my dogs asleep on the couch next to me, thinking about universal pre-K and the number of times I’ve sat in Frankfort committee meetings listening to dejected citizens tell the legislature about childcare deserts, the prohibitive cost of childcare, how common it is for kids to show up in Kindergarten not knowing their colors or how to hold a book.. And I thought about how this year’s legislature is going to waste our time and our tax dollars, yet again, arguing about DEI.

They won’t even consider universal pre-K, and it has nothing to do with the budget. Our Republican lawmakers can’t give our beloved Democratic governor the slightest perceived win, even if it means we all lose.

Ten years ago, when we arrived in the paradise that was and is rural Kentucky, who could have imagined the massive, deleterious affect a multiply-bankrupt New York City billionaire playboy would have on us, on our neighbors, on our legislature, on our lives.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good’s dog. How scared he must have been in the backseat of her SUV as she was shot to death by an ICE agent who was filming her — we see this clearly in video — with his cell phone in one hand while drawing his gun with the other, and then we hear the agent who shot her say, “Fucking bitch.”

I am thinking about Renee Good and her loved ones and her children and her community. I am thinking about her blood on the airbag, her six year old at school, her dog in the backseat.

Renee Good was not shot to death because she did something wrong.

Renee Good was shot to death because this is where a decade of 24/7 hateful, dehumanizing, political rhetoric leads; because the leaders we elected to represent us in the statehouse and the U.S. Capitol have allowed the president they either worship or are terrified of deploy thousands of masked gunmen into our streets to terrorize American citizens.

Renee Good was shot to death by a member of the president’s personal masked police force, who was filming himself shooting her for the president’s entertainment.

I am thinking about Renee Good’s dog because my heart hurts too much to think directly about the totality of her unnecessary death.

I bet Renee Good loved her dog.