To the Editor,
I’m writing as a lifelong Ohioan, a nursing student, and a woman who is deeply unsettled by how normalized cruelty has become in this country and by how quietly our local leaders and institutions seem to accept it as business as usual.
I understand the role of local journalism and the responsibility to remain apolitical. I understand neutrality. But at what point does this stop being political and start being about basic human decency? About right and wrong?
What is happening right now in Washington and across the country is not normal. This is no longer a disagreement over policy or ideology. People are being terrorized. Communities are living in fear. Americans are being killed during federal enforcement actions. And what makes this even more disturbing is the sense that there is an active effort to minimize, obscure, or explain away what is happening rather than confront it honestly.
So I am left asking whether we are waiting until it is one of our ICU nurses. One of our Mansfield neighbors. Someone pulled from their car, their job, or their home here before we decide this moment deserves moral clarity.
There is no shortage of leadership driving this cruelty. Stephen Miller has been explicit for years about his vision for immigration enforcement and racial hierarchy. Kristi Noem has eagerly aligned herself with these policies, defending and amplifying them rather than questioning their human cost.
And all of this unfolds while there is credible reporting that Donald Trump has personally profited enormously since becoming president, enriching himself while fear and chaos ripple through everyday communities. Even without arguing over exact figures, the reality is that power and profit are being consolidated while ordinary people pay the price.
How can anyone still align with these policies of fabricated fear and division and claim the moral high ground? This is no longer about taxes, budgets, or limited government. It is about human beings being dehumanized. It is about neighbors with accents or brown skin wondering if today is the day they are next.
If that fear sounds exaggerated to some, it is usually because they have been fortunate enough not to live it or because they have learned to minimize racism so thoroughly that it becomes invisible even when it is happening in plain sight.
I know this because I lived it.
I laughed off racist jokes for years to keep the peace. My sister laughed off being called chinky at school because that was what survival looked like at the time. Assimilation became armor. Silence became strategy.
But none of that made it acceptable, and it does not make what is happening now acceptable either.
Somewhere along the way, being anti racist became something to mock. Empathy was reframed as weakness. And now we are at a point where suffering is celebrated, cruelty is excused, and compassion is treated like a punchline.
That should alarm every one of us, regardless of political affiliation.
Alex, the nurse killed in Minneapolis, was doing what nurses and decent humans do. He was protecting his neighbors. Showing up. Refusing to look away. If that kind of humanity can get you killed and then quietly folded into a sanitized narrative, we need to ask ourselves what our silence enables.
Because silence is not neutral. Silence is compliance. Silence is complacency.
I am not writing as a policy expert. I am writing as a tired, angry, hopeful human being asking for empathy to matter again. Asking for local leaders, institutions, and media to speak with moral clarity. Asking communities like ours to stop pretending this moment is normal, acceptable, or inevitable.
At what point do we say enough is enough?
From where I am standing, this is no longer politics. It is a moral emergency. And pretending otherwise feels like complicity.
Nicci See
Mansfield, Ohio