Culture Friday: When stories turn deadly

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, January 16th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us now, journalist Maria Baer! Now you’ve heard Maria voicing commentaries for WORLD, telling stories here on this program, and if you’re a Breakpoint This Week listener, you probably are, you know Maria as John Stonestreet’s cohost. So with John away this week, we thought we would call up Maria. So Maria, welcome, and good morning to you!

MARIA BAER: Good morning, Nick and Myrna. I’m honored to be here and I promise not to poke too much fun at John while he’s away … [laughs]

EICHER: Well not too much, but enough!

Well, Maria, I wanted to make sure you’d heard a recent Allie Beth Stuckey podcast, and you had … and you found it just as interesting a take on the sad situation in Minnesota as I found it to be.

But to catch the listener up who may not be familiar with it, I want to retell in brief, Stuckey’s attempt to explain to her conservative audience why the woman shot in Minneapolis by an ICE agent acted as she did.

Now Stuckey retold the Renee Good story from a sympathetic point of view—by reconstructing the moral world that Stuckey believed that Good was living in. And in that telling, Good had absorbed a steady stream of online narratives portraying immigration enforcement as a replay of history’s darkest chapter—America as 1930s Germany, ICE as kidnappers, and silence as complicity.

And as Stuckey told the story, Good may have been convinced that history was testing her, and she believed action was required of her—but certainly not because she was seeking violence, certainly not wanting things to end as they did. 

Now Allie Beth Stuckey told this very sympathetic story over about four minutes time on her podcast. Let me just play a few seconds of how she delivered it, just to give you a flavor of what it sounded like:

STUCKEY: If evil is to be stopped, good men and women must do something. Renee knew this. She had been involved in protests before. As a queer woman, she felt fidelity to everyone who fell outside of the norms of the cis, hetero, white patriarchy—and she felt obligated to lend her influence to the cause of equality. She was a mother. A wife. A fierce defender of progress for the sake of her children and her country …

Well now Maria, this is one of those scenarios where you perceive that you are in a moment of history and you want history to judge you well. You want to be, as they say, on the “right side of history.” And moral certainty hardens into obligation to take action. What do you think about that? Does that sound about right?

BAER: It’s a great question. I was really compelled by Allie Beth’s characterization of the situation. I'm grateful for it, because I think, in her words, what she wanted to do was help those of us who maybe are a little bit more skeptical or trying to understand the situation from both sides.

I want to be clear, I’m going to speak in generalities here, because I, of course, did not know Renee Good. I know Allie Beth didn’t pretend to know her.

I think there were a couple things at play here.

The first one is, given the way we live our lives right now, which is increasingly online. I think a lot of interactions like this one feel less real to us than they are. I was struck by that after seeing this video, which I frankly wish I hadn’t seen.

You know, right now, our definition of “doing something” more and more means saying something online. And I think that that has had a real impact on how we perceive the situations we’re actually in in the real world.

I remember feeling this way after the shooting of Charlie Kirk and reading some of the text exchanges between the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, and his friend, or however you’d characterize this other person, afterwards. And I felt the same watching Renee Good.

I think in the moments before her death, she was—you could see her kind of like dancing in her car. She didn’t seem to understand the stakes that she was in a truly life-or-death dangerous situation. She was not acting like she was in that situation.

So I think that’s really important to understand her actions, first of all. Allie Beth’s characterization was sort of a valiant woman charging into battle like ready to lay down her life, and I just don’t think most of us think about life that way. I don’t think that’s where her mind was.

The other part of Allie Beth’s characterization was that Renee Good’s actions can be somewhat understood by this phenomenon called “misplaced mothering.”

Now Renee Good was, of course, a literal mother, she had children, which adds to the tragedy of the situation. But there is, you know, this idea floating around that as we have more we have fewer children in America, women in particular are built with this innate design and purpose towards nurture and care for children, and when they don’t have children, that that design and desire gets directed to something else. And it, as Allie Beth said, it could be pets or plants or political causes. 

But in this situation, I’m not sure that that applies, and here’s why: you don’t see people like Allie Beth was describing, the sort of archetypal liberal, progressive woman who is, you know, an activist, you don’t see them typically doing the actual work of nurturing the people that they say they’re caring for. 

And that’s the distinction I’m drawing. If this were really an issue of misplaced mothering and the desire to nurture being misdirected, we would see actual nurture, and that’s not what we’re seeing.

BROWN: Maria, my ears perked up when I heard you mention earlier women, our innate desire to mother, which fits perfectly to this question that I have for you: Married motherhood. We’ve talked about this before on Culture Friday, how depression rates are generally lower in married moms, how rates of personal satisfaction are higher in married moms.

Still, some young women today see married motherhood as as low status. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think is behind that, and how we can change it?

BAER: I think about it all the time. I think you’re right that marriage and motherhood, particularly stay-at-home motherhood, is perceived as socially low status right now.

I think there’s a lot of factors as to why that is, but I definitely think that has contributed to the lower birth rates and lower marriage rates that we’re seeing. And I don’t think that’s a positive thing.

When I talk about the innate desire of women to nurture and that that needs an outlet, that is a deeply human desire and a human need. Nothing provides that more than becoming a parent. Nothing requires the sort of relentless laying down of yourself like becoming a parent does, and it turns out, we need to have the opportunity to rise to that challenge.

It’s a paradox, because, you know, some of the same surveys that show higher levels of satisfaction and meaning in married moms also show much higher levels of stress and lower levels of sleep, and all of the above for married moms, which seems like a paradox, because we we tend to think of happiness as pleasure. But all of the happiness research shows it’s not actually pleasure, it is meaning and satisfaction, and nothing gives us that like marriage and motherhood, which is why it is so sad that it’s been perceived as low status.

I’m fascinated as to why that’s happened. I do think one of the reasons is pretty basic, and it’s that it’s not something that you’ve proven that you can do, that nobody else can do, and therefore you’ve made your mark on the world.

But again, paradoxically, being a mom is one of the most unique individual things you can do for the world. Because many, many, many women can be mothers, but no one else but you can mother your children.

And I think it’s a lie from the enemy that it’s commonplace or somehow boring, or it’s less impactful to be a married mom.

I’d love to see the social status of being a married mom rise. I think one of the best ways we’re going to do that is by becoming married moms and making it look cool, and that is my personal goal. So … (laughs)

BROWN: Well, we talked about poking a little fun at John earlier, and so now we get to do it. I didn’t bring this up last week talking about CCM, because CCM is not John’s thing, so I thought "I have a chance now."

So we’re talking about Amy Grant. Last week, on January 6th, she released a new single, and it is called "January 6". You’ve heard it.

Part of the lyric, 'I hear the words John Lennon said, asking me to “imagine,”' referring to his anti-Christian worldview song, "Imagine."

A lot of chatter on this. Christians split down the middle, different sides. Some people say, you know, they’re rushing to her defense, "she’s being viciously attacked." And then others say, "Well, anybody who believes that Woodstock or John Lennon’s 'Imagine' are things to celebrate has truly lost their way."

So Maria, does this sound like someone simply wrestling with pain and division through artistic expression?

BAER: I love this question, Myrna, and I am going to dedicate myself to finding a way to bring this up on Breakpoint this week, just so I can see John’s side-eyed glance at me, which would signify 'we are not going there.'

I have heard the song. I have to say, it made me nostalgic for riding in the car with my mom, listening to the radio and hearing her sing. She sounds incredible.

This song is strange, Myrna. I, you know, when January 6 came and went this year, I did have a moment where I was like, "oh my goodness, that’s right, this was supposed to be the day that ended everything, and that, you know, our democracy just flew away in the in the middle of the day, and we all, you know, we woke up to a new world the next day."

And it just remarkably does not feel like that.

And I thought of all the other things that felt so much more serious, like the fact that during COVID we had wild west zones in cities like Seattle and Portland where there was no rule of law except mobs that had taken over full city blocks. And somehow that’s not part of our conversation about, you know, the challenges to democracy.

But this song to me, more just it felt again, like the desire to be seen as the right kind of person, to be seen as the person who cares about the right kinds of things and says the right code words.

I mean, to bring it all back to what we were talking about at the beginning, so much of this is posturing. It feels like a game. It’s sending the signals that you’re the right kind of person and you think the right things, and you’re in the right club, and the wrong kind of people will not like this song, and therefore I’m the right kind of-- I mean, it’s hard not to, you know, again, be cynical, but to see it that way, just because it was such a melodramatic song. And it still seems strange to me, given the state of our at least somewhat functioning democracy at this point, to point to January 6 as being anything other than an embarrassing riot.

EICHER: Maria Baer is a journalist and cohost of Breakpoint This Week. Maria, enjoyed the visit, Maria, thank you.

BAER: So good to see you, Nick and Myrna, thanks for having me.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.