Is Renee Good an allegory, fable, or parable?

By Alfred P. Doblin

I’ve never fully understood what differentiates an allegory from a fable or from a parable. It has something to do with length and complexity. Fables are short. Parables have a moral. So, perhaps what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7, is an allegory. It is not a short narrative, and I have yet to find a clear moral.

Morality is clearly the thing most absent in this horrific American tragedy.

Some facts are clear: A 37-year-old white woman, also a mom married to a woman, was in her car blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from carrying out their mission. What exactly is that mission in Minneapolis remains unclear. Is it immigration enforcement or is it a public demonstration of federal force?

ICE agents are sweeping across the nation – mainly in “blue” states – arresting with impunity. Impunity is what happens when the vice president of our republic states that ICE agents have absolute immunity from prosecution regardless of what they do. ICE agents have a hard job, one that requires extensive training in how to deal with crisis situations. When training is deficient and the mission is misguided, tragedy becomes inevitable.

I was in the seventh grade when the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of unarmed students at Kent State, killing four and wounding 9 others. The nation was horrified. That was the spring of 1970.

The winter of 2026 is different. There is no national horror at the killing of Renee Good, although many are horrified. In 2026, there is no national unity on anything aside from accepting that disunity is normative.

All people should recognize that the current situation in Minneapolis is not sustainable, nor is the escalation of force by federal agents. Cooler heads would seek to lower the national temperature. But how can you lower that when so many people refuse to believe the Earth has gotten dangerously hot?

Fate – and I am increasingly believing in something like fate – put a woman named Good on a street in Minneapolis where she would be shot and killed by an ICE agent. She did not wake up that morning planning to die or have her face broadcast across the globe as the visage of either a resistance to federal law enforcement or a resistance to an aggressive federal government no longer curtailed by any guardrails.

If this was a fable, it would be literally Good versus evil. But it is not a fable. It is a real-life event that cast Good, both upper and lowercase, against a society that has lost its soul. That would be parable territory if we, as a nation, believed in parables. But we do not.

In Genesis 19, in the prelude to the destruction of Sodom, townspeople who are trying to abduct the messengers of God, tell Lot who is offering the angels shelter, “Get out of the way! This man came here as a foreigner, and now he’s acting like a judge! So we’re going to deal more harshly with you than with them.” 

Translations vary, but Lot was a “foreigner,” an “alien,” to the townspeople, and because of that status he was lower to them than even the visitors. Genesis is woke.

In the section prior to this, Abraham negotiates with God about the destruction of Sodom. In what is a better example of the art of the deal than one can find in contemporary history, Abraham talks God down from 50 to 10 righteous people as the number needed to save Sodom from destruction. When I was a boy hearing that story for the first time, the number seemed so low – 10 righteous people in a whole city. But as the story goes, there were not 10 to be found, and so Sodom was destroyed.

Many on the right use the destruction of the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of what happens when homosexuality is condoned. It is a skewed understanding of the story. The “wickedness” of Sodom was not about homosexuality or having sex; it was about the complete disregard for the value and the dignity of the human being.

It is not lost on me that Renee Good was married to a woman, or that she lived in one of the Twin Cities, or that there is a deficit of righteous people willing to say “enough is enough,” we can find a better way to curtail illegal immigration, we can find a better way to respect deeply felt differences of opinion on public policy, while we never fail to respect our shared humanity.

Perhaps there are not even 10 righteous people in our government because there are too few righteous people left in America? I hope that is not true.

In 1970, I didn’t fully grasp what had happened at Kent State. In 2026, I understand what happened in Minneapolis. And I understand the message of Genesis 18 and 19. Perhaps at a time when God is merely a word to bandied about when convenient to a cause, there will be no literal destruction of our society by the hand of the Creator. But we should not fool ourselves. America, at this moment in time, is not the “shining city on a hill.”

We are lit not with joy and righteousness, but with hate and retribution.

Our story is not an allegory. It is not a fable. It is not a parable. It is sad.

Until next time, Alfred with a P