I saw two white men kneeling on a brown man, forcing his face into the blacktop of the highway yesterday afternoon. Tonight, in the wee hours of July 4th, my country’s birthday, I cannot sleep because I cannot understand how we got here.

Five of us, two teenagers and three adults, were driving home from a baseball game on Interstate 25. Traffic slowed, and my daughter asked why there was a car facing the wrong way on the road. Sure enough, there was an empty SUV pointed north in the southbound lane. Strange, but we, and all the other cars, swerved around it and drove on. What were we going to do, stop turn the SUV around? Before the next exit, there were two munched cars on the side of the road. The people in that accident were out and about, so I assumed it was a normal highway fender bender. Maybe related to the backwards SUV? We kept driving.

Then I saw the third accident. A person with copper skin, an orange shirt, and kinky black hair was getting resuscitated by the side of the road. He was on the ground and a white man had his hands over his heart. I saw the white man doing chest compressions and I did that thing where I didn’t want to look for fear of the gore, but I looked anyway. And then I really saw. The man was not doing chest compressions. The man, a white man, was kneeling on the brown man. The white man had the arms of the brown man pulled behind his back. The white man wasn’t saving the brown man’s life, but pressing his body into the asphalt. The brown man’s face was smashed into the black asphalt on a 91 degree day. Next to the white man knelt another white man. Then we were past them. I’m humiliated to say we didn’t do anything. We just drove on and got ice cream, like we were planning. While a man was being pressed into the scalding highway we got ice cream.

We aren’t monsters. We talked about the scene. Four of us had the same life saving first impression, followed by an oh-shit moment. My daughter’s friend never doubted that she was seeing a white man kneeling on a brown man. We all agreed that the men weren’t police. They weren’t in uniforms. They were men, like my husband, forcing another man into the street. My daughter’s friend, the one with the clearest vision of the situation, commented that the white men had the brown man’s head awfully close to the oncoming traffic, like they didn’t care if he got run over. She wasn’t wrong. My friend wondered what she could do in retirement to make things better. On our way home, we drove past the scene, but traffic had cleared and the tableau was gone.

How did my country end up here? In my almost 51 years, I never dreamed I would witness such a thing. This was a story my dad would tell me from his childhood in Texas. After the fact, I wonder if I’d been alone, would I have stopped? If I’d been driving, would I have stopped? I’m CPR trained. If they were doing compressions I could have helped. If I had mistakenly stopped to help and realized what was going on, could I have made them see the man as a human being who should be treated with dignity? Should I have called someone? Later in the day, I logged onto the godforsaken Twitter app to check the Denver Police feed, but there was nothing. I checked the Facebook Colorado State Patrol feed and there was nothing. Nothing about a backwards car, an accident, or a public assault on a brown man anywhere.

I know there’s a phone number I’m supposed to call if I see ICE agents in our metro area, but I didn’t think of that until tonight. Do they want to hear about something that happened hours ago? I am ashamed of myself. I am a white lady and I need to do better. The country that exists in my head, where people stop by the side of the road to help people is gone. I’m ashamed of my reaction and my behavior. I have the same sick feeling I had when I learned that other families taught their kids how to be safe with the police, while I grew up in a bubble thinking all police would help me.

On our way into the baseball game, we followed a man whose shirt read “Gunpa, like a Grandpa but with more guns and more fun.” At the baseball game the Colorado Rockies were playing the Houston Astros, and I was aggravated by all the obnoxious Texas fans. I stood quietly during the national anthem, while the woman next to me held her hand over her heart and belted out the song. At the 7th inning stretch I remarked that I was grateful we no longer sang “God Bless America” after “Take Me out to the Ballgame.” Those little differences seem like they could exist in the same country. The kind of annoying disparities that make up a population of human beings. Meanwhile, the chasm between the country I thought I lived in, where men stop to do CPR on another man, and the country I actually live in, where men publicly assault other men on the highway, don’t feel like they should exist on the same planet. I need to learn to live in the reality that actually exists, as awful as it is.