Keith Porter Junior. Forty-three years old. Black father. Los Angeles. New Year's Eve, 2025. An off-duty ICE agent shot him dead outside his own home. The Department of Homeland Security called him an active shooter. His family says he was firing his gun into the air to welcome the new year. The tradition is illegal. The punishment is not supposed to be death.

Renée Good. Thirty-seven years old. American citizen. Minneapolis. January 7, 2026. ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots into her car. She was stopped in the street. She moved forward. He was standing at the front left of the vehicle. She turned away from him. He fired. Three shots. She died.

Alex Pretti. Thirty-seven years old. American citizen. ICU nurse at the VA hospital. Minneapolis. January 24, 2026. Two Customs and Border Protection officers shot him multiple times. He was a protester. He had been in the streets since Renée Good was killed. He went out to protest the killing of an American citizen and became the next American citizen killed.

That is the sequence. Porter. Good. Pretti. Three names. Three American citizens. Eight weeks.

I know this sequence. I have lived inside this sequence. In 1969 the state of Michigan arrested me for two joints of marijuana and sentenced me to ten years. The arrest was not about marijuana. The arrest was about what I represented. The state does not arrest the plant. The state arrests the frequency.

John Lennon wrote a song. Fifteen thousand people came to a rally. Three days later I was free. The rally did not change the law. The rally changed the politics. The politics changed the sentence. That is how it works. That is the only way it has ever worked.

March 28. No Kings. They are predicting it will be the largest nonviolent protest in American history. A thousand cities. The AFL-CIO. The ACLU. Indivisible. Three hundred organizations. The flagship in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis. Where Renée Good died. Where Alex Pretti died.

They did not choose Minneapolis for the symbolism. They chose Minneapolis because that is where the killing happened. The protest goes to the wound. That is what a protest does. It does not go to the capital. It goes to the body.

Operation Metro Surge. That is what they called it. December 2025. Federal agents moved into the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. Three thousand arrests. Warrantless. Aggressive. Citizens detained. And then the shooting started. And then the names started.

The state does not create the protest. The state creates the reason for the protest. Every time. Without exception. They arrested me and created a rally. They shot Keith Porter and created a vigil. They shot Renée Good and created a movement. They shot Alex Pretti — a man who was in the streets because of what they did to Renée Good — and they created March 28.

I will be watching on March 28. I will be listening. Not for the size of the crowd. Not for the speeches. Not for the signs. I will be listening for what happens on March 29. Because I know what happens the morning after. Most people go home. Most people go back to work. The ones who do not go home — those are the ones who change the law. Those are the ones who change the sentence. Those are the ones who make the names mean something other than a list.

Keith Porter. Renée Good. Alex Pretti. Remember the names. The march is for the names.

See also: The March — March 28. No Kings. The morning after is what matters. Ten for Two — two joints, ten years, the sentence that started everything. The Rally — fifteen thousand people, John Lennon on stage, three days later freedom. The Morning After — what happens when the crowd goes home. Eighty Percent — the math changed but the sentence has not been corrected. The Cell — four walls, ten years, the state's answer to a frequency.

Sources: Wikipedia: March 2026 No Kings protests. PBS News: Shooting deaths in mass deportation effort. Al Jazeera: ICE-related deaths in 2026.