There’s a popular Korean saying that I always heard growing up: “You can’t spit at a smiling face.” I’ve never spat in anyone’s face before, smiling or scowling, but I did notice this: I can never seem to despise someone enjoying a popsicle. 

Every Monday for the last several months, single mother Alma Ruth crossed the border between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. The town is infamous for its violent cartel turf wars: The U.S. State Department issued the highest travel advisory (last updated Dec. 17, 2019) to that area for “crime and kidnapping,” which includes armed robberies, murder, sexual assaults, and extortion.

Jessi Green stood in the middle of hundreds of people gathered at Huntington Beach, Calif., holding a loudspeaker and a Bible, and broke into tears. She told a crowd of worshippers that police officers knocked on her door that day, July 24, to deliver a citation for holding a large public gathering without a permit. “There is a possibility of us getting arrested,” she said, voice breaking, “and I just felt that was such an honor. I just never thought something like that could happen in America.” 

I first learned about the “defund the police” movement, like many others, via social media—that place where everyone has a platform to post or repost very complex ideas into 280 characters or a square box. So when I saw people I follow call passionately for defunding the police—whether it’s outright abolishing them or diverting parts of their budgets to social services—what I saw wasn’t well-thought out ideas so much as a call to reimagine a better world. 

On a warm February morning, Julian Canales, a Los Angeles Police Department officer, stood at an alley in East Hollywood, watching a homeless man camped behind somebody’s back gate. The man was in his 60s and had an undiagnosed mental illness. He had a frizzy salt-and-pepper beard, a lime-green comb sticking out of his large Afro, and an astringent body odor. His dirt-caked hands trembled from Parkinson’s disease. His legs were raw, peeling, and oozing from some kind of infection. For the past five years the man had been refusing any kind of services from a homeless outreach team.

While local leaders across the country made pledges to defund the police, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have resisted doing so. Even top Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden, Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Karen Bass, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have hesitated or outright said they don’t support defunding the police. 

But both Republicans and Democrats agree there’s a clear need for police reform. They just can’t agree on how to fix it, despite some overlap in legislation. 

I heard the first year of marriage is always tough. That made sense to me: You have two separate lives joining into one, and that will require some painstaking sacrifices and compromises. What’s more, both my husband, David, and I got married in our 30s. We’ve enjoyed more than 30 years of independence, and with that comes our own rigid habits and hard-to-break lifestyles. I just never expected that the one major conflict we’d have in our marriage would be over my cat.