When discussing the occupation of Minnesota, trite observations abound. Scandinavians are uniquely inclined to collective action; oh yah sure you betcha the cold never bothered us anyway; everyone unites to take care of the children; something about soccer moms; something about We The People. I am not confused by this tendency. For many people, most people, the occupation of Minnesota is what's happening in "Minneapolis", and it's content. What happens to individuals is something to be debated online, with most people's understanding of the "situation on the ground" being whatever their favorite freelancer or streamer told them. I will confess that I expected this behavior from random internet-brained posters, but seeing it from Jacobin and New Yorker types is a bit jarring. Aren't y'all supposed to be smart?
Anyway. Today was a day of action for many people, but a day of rest for my household. I had to do the laundry, and tomorrow we have church and I have patrol shifts and paying our credit cards, which will not be a minor event since we dropped something like $4k on the work this month. It's weird how little I care about that right now. My wife and I work in tech, I care about accumulating wealth in terms of securing my family's safety and comfort, but when I think about my savings as anything other than a tool to leverage in this time, I feel infinitesimally small before God. (This sounds dramatic, but I do also feel dramatic, so that's okay.) Next week I'm going to be doing more than one kind of patrol shift, both RR patrols and school patrols, plus food pantry donations, plus caucusing. The DFL is telling us that we can caucus to HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE but I don't think Angie Craig will be at the high school for me to ask how she lives with herself. Nor will Klob. But however they live with themselves, we have to live with them. I'll be caucusing for Peggy Flanagan, of course.
We delivered food to a friend yesterday. This friend seems to live much further away than she actually does, because I live by a highway, and the nearest streets to cross it are a few blocks north or south from me. "A few blocks" is nothing in a car, which is how we delivered the food, but it's certainly not nothing when you're walking or even biking, which is how I normally get around. Transit doesn't facilitate crossing the highway from one residential area to another, either. So we delivered food to a friend in a part of town we are rarely in, strategizing on crossing the highway and making sure we weren't being tailed, marveling at how close-yet-far this was from us, and when we arrived there were three other people delivering food on the same couple-block stretch. Entire neighborhoods decimated by this hamfisted attempt at ethnic cleansing done at the behest of a Jewish Nazi from Santa Monica. I always wonder if he sought out active KKK members when he went to Duke. I guess I wonder a lot of things.
A judge has ordered the release of Liam Ramos and his father. A small-town sheriff interrupted DHS's abduction of his buddy's wife. I saw a woman run for her apartment today with cover from 3 neighbors. (If ICE was around, and they often are, they didn't show themselves.) I saw ICE on a frontage road yesterday. I saw ICE at school patrol yesterday. ICE has been hanging around the fifth precinct for days at a time despite the separation ordinance. They arrested four Black journalists and politicians, including Don Lemon, which alarmed people more than I expected. They are posting on Twitter for attorneys to "DM me" if they want to be an AUSA. A drunk Trump fan attacked Ilhan Omar, who pulled back to punch him. There's an article about ICE claiming that a man they illegally detained (Alberto Castañeda Mondragón) ran headfirst into a brick wall and gave himself traumatic skull fractures. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about us. Congress may or may not tell DHS to pwetty pwease stop breaking the law. Tom Homan's "drawdown" has yet to materialize, perhaps because his Klan grandmasters have reminded him that if they leave, and we win, the entire country will know this monster can in fact be slain. I certainly haven't forgotten.
We drove to Kate's sister's directly after delivering the food, getting right on another highway, driving through another neighborhood decimated by another type of racist. I'm tired of how much history rhymes. It's starting to feel like we're trapped in an evil Dr. Seuss book, an AI-generated mirror-universe version of The Lorax. We continue on because we have to. I don't know what to say when anyone texts me. I don't know what to say when someone says, how are you, what is it like.
