More than a year after a fateful night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Kyle
Rittenhouse is crying in front of a jury. He was just a regular, patriotic
kid who wanted to be a cop; now he is an icon, a symbol incarnate of a
country tearing itself apart at the seams. If the tears had not been
enough, if the arguments were not enough, he would have gone to prison for
shooting three people and killing two of them instead of going into
nursing like his mother. That is not the way the story was supposed to go.

Policing seemed easy enough on the ride-alongs he did as a kid with the
local department, and in August 2020, when he was 17, the situation was
dire enough � according to all that he was hearing � that reinforcements
were necessary. Barely half an hour away, Kenosha and its safe sprawl were
under siege; seemingly endless images of upheaval emerged to prove that
the small Wisconsin suburb was in distress. It wasn�t like Kyle could do
nothing with the world burning. He was the good guy motivated by good
intentions who just happened to be pushed into a bad outcome: So what is
he supposed to apologize for?

We are a nation riven by this question, each side aghast at the gall of
the other to deny the answer that should so obviously be produced. To many
people, there is nothing for Kyle Rittenhouse to feel bad about, no crime
that he committed. He was simply doing what should have been done, what
the police and politicians were too weak to do, what needs to happen more
often for this country to be great. For others, he is a harbinger of
unleashed violence, a specter of domestic terrorism, a brutal memory of
traumas past and present. For this side of the argument, should Kyle
Rittenhouse be liberated into a normal life, it will be an invitation to
destruction.

And yet, despite all of the attention, despite all of the protest and
admonition, Kyle Rittenhouse is an average white boy from an average white
family settled in an average white suburb. It is unlikely in anonymity
that he would have been called a �bad kid.� From the short 17 years of his
life prior to last summer, there�s not much of a track record of
antisocial or violent behavior, few extreme posts, and lots of baby-faced
enthusiasm. He is a mirror of the American median, and so an uncomfortable
reflection on the culture we have cultivated. If the violent death he is
responsible for represents who he is, then it represents who we are, too.

We did not merely watch a trial about a boy and a gun but one about the
hypocrisy at the core of American mythology. Rittenhouse was young enough
to be a child yet accepted by others that evening as old enough to carry a
lethal weapon; he was an �isolated incident� in the midst of a coordinated
coalition of white men armed on dark streets. We are told that he had no
investment in supremacy, but he chose to call a friend rather than
paramedics after firing his first shots, and he has been draped with the
shield of self-defense for bringing a loaded weapon to protests over a
Black man shot in the back. For a nation where atrocity only happens in
the passive voice and the past tense, that we cannot deny such unambiguous
agency is an existential crisis.

Rittenhouse thought that he was living the story of a good guy with a gun
because everything in our society told him as much. This is the truth we
have tried to deny, the reality that the trial has brought into sharp
relief. He was an ordinary person living an ordinary life with ordinary
hobbies and passions, and in a series of ordinary choices � wanting the
gun, having his friend purchase it for him, driving to his friend�s house
to retrieve it � he did a monstrous thing. And in this, he is simply a new
chapter in a long legacy of American monstrosity.

Rottenlouse was anything *but* a "good guy with a gun." He was where he
had no business being, armed with a gun he had no business having at all,
let alone let loose on a public street in a civil disturbance.