WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2026
What the neighbor said: "They were always so happy and so polite," their neighbor in Biddeford, Maine has now said.
They were a husband and wife and a 3-year-old child. The New York Times is reporting the neighbor's recollection in this morning's news report:
Colombian Immigrant Killed by ICE in Maine Had Legal Status, Father Says
The father of a Colombian immigrant shot and killed by a federal agent in Maine on Monday described him as “a good person raised with strong values,” who worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
“He had a great vision for getting ahead, so many dreams to fulfill,” Omar Duran, the father of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, told Noticias Caracol, a Colombian news outlet, on Tuesday, speaking in Spanish. “My son is a wonderful son—I don’t know why they did that to him.”
Mr. Guerrero, 25, lived in Biddeford, a small city south of Portland, where he worked as a food delivery driver and a late-night cleaner at a veterinary clinic. Mr. Duran said his son was in the United States legally.
[...]
“They were always so happy and so polite,” Don Gregoire, 69, a hairstylist, said of Mr. Guerrero and his wife. “I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”
Did the deceased "have legal status?" As far as we know, that still isn't clear. It's also true that many people seem to have learned, in the past eighteen months, that "legal status" under one president may suddenly be something different under the subsequent president.
“They were always so happy and so polite,” their neighbor has told the Times. Polite may often follow from happy, and it's good to be happy and young.
Hemingway wrote about happy and young in his beautiful recollection, A Moveable Feast. In its original version, the memoir ends with this:
A Moveable Feast
[...]
This is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
That's the memoir's final paragraph. Until the sudden astonishing end of the story, he and Hadley were poor and happy, and they were very young.
No people are uninteresting, Yevtushenko said. We came upon his poem in a book, way back when we ourselves were somewhat younger. When we first read it, we found it deeply moving in a way we still do, though we still can't begin to say why.
No people are uninteresting! We'll change one word in the translation as we recall the way the poem starts:
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a [person] lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
Or if a person lived "in obscurity" complimenting his neighbor's flowers as he walked down the street with his wife and his 3-year-old child.
(Many people in southern Maine grow flowers in their shorter, cooler summers. We've seen it with our own eyes.)
No people are uninteresting! Presumably, Yevtushenko was thinking of the millions lost under Stalin, or of the tens of thousands of men, women and children—none of them uninteresting—massacred at Babi Yar.
Presumably, that's who he mainly had in mind. Presumably, though, he was also thinking of this young couple in Maine, and of their 3-year-old child.
That said:
Can it possibly be true? In the simplest colloquial sense, can it be true that no people are uninteresting? None of us people at all?
How about the furious fellow whose video rant was recently reposted by the sitting president? As we noted yesterday afternoon, the 49-minute rant started off like this:
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED
Right now in America, politically, we are in the late stage of the disease of Communism. The smirking con man from Uganda had the audacity to sit behind George Washington's desk in New York City the other day, basically declaring a revolution on America, surrounded by no Americans, none of them were citizens.
These were all invaders.
I'm going to tell you a story today about a little man, just like this smirking bastard in New York City, named Pol Pot...
And so on from there. For the record, this man chose "Savage" as his pen name. Over the weekend, the sitting president chose to report his 49-minute rant on his own Truth Social site.
At this site, we're willing to wait to see how Mayor Mamdani's tenure turns out. According to the furious Michael Savage, the mayor is a "smirking bastard"—a smirking con man from Uganda—who is planning to oversee the slaughter of millions of people, just as Pol Pot did.
No people are uninteresting? Does Michael Savage count? And how about the high official who chose to repost that rant?
Regarding the high official in question, we've suggested that it would be effective politics, and more accurate on the merits, to pity him for his "mental disorders."
We've suggested that a (serious) mental illness is, in fact, an illness. We've also said that we would guess that his niece's assessment is right:
BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?
MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.
For the longer exchange with CNN's Erin Burnett, you can just click here.
In the passage posted above, Mary Trump said her uncle is experiencing an obvious cognitive decline, layered atop decades of untreated psychiatric disorders. She went into much more detail in her best-selling 2020 family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough.
"No people are uninteresting?" As he blusters and keeps changing his mind, does her uncle count?
The so-called democratization of media—the rise in technologies which Jeffrey Rosen has now discussed—has brought many savage voices into the public square. At present, we'd say that most of these voices come from Red America, but those of us in Blue America have our own decidedly mixed track record.
Is there a way to get out of this mess—a way "back out of all this now too much for us?" For today, we'll return to what one Maine resident said:
"They were always so happy and so polite."
They were always so happy and so polite! So how do we deal with this mess?
