We continue here our report from the ground in Minneapolis that we began in yesterday’s DM. To me, it constitutes a 5-alarm fire for all who believe in democracy. (Including the fellow from Australia whose powerful article I shared in Sunday’s video who spoke to the global response to the invasion of Minnesota by the American government.)
Like every parent here, I worry for my daughter’s school because they are, yes, targeting schools. Last week they attacked students and staff at a Minneapolis high school. Yesterday it was a middle school and elementary school. Today it was circling nearly all South Minneapolis elementary and middle schools. ICE is at day care centers and preschools. Parents are volunteering to monitor school pickups and dropoffs, and yesterday there was police presence at my daughter’s school.
Many kids can’t even go to school now because there’s so much fear they or their parents will be taken. Schools are rushing to create online lessons and hybrid setups to accommodate those who don’t feel safe enough to come to school. Children have literally been abducted on their way home from school by ICE. I know of at least one parent who was abducted at a bus stop today while she stood with her elementary school child. They illegally entered the college campus I worked at and abducted a student there. Again, this is just what I know of through my own personal networks.
Oh, and ICE is also blocking the food distribution center for the Minneapolis Public Schools, so trucks can’t get out to deliver lunches. It’s been reported to the Minnesota Attorney General, but that doesn’t change the fact that students will go hungry.
Thousands upon thousands of people are afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, visit food shelves, get medicine, or go to work. Businesses are empty or closed because workers are terrified to travel to or be visible in their jobs. Women in our neighborhood are asking through back channels about at-home midwives because they’re afraid to go to the hospital to have their babies. And their fear is warranted! ICE has been entering hospitals without warrants. They’ve attacked people outside hospitals, and they’ve also been waiting outside multiple hospitals, including a children’s hospital, to pick up people of color who come out the doors.
Neighborhoods and churches, including my own, are scrambling to organize mutual aid efforts to get groceries to people or help pay bills while family members can’t go to work or drive those who are afraid to be seen behind the wheel or at a bus stop. We’re not just talking about undocumented people. We’re talking about any person of color. These are our neighbors. Our children’s classmates. Our friends and family members.
Our city but increasingly our entire metro area is seeing and dealing with these cosplay thugs every single day. And they are moving into rural areas as well, picking up people indiscriminately. Again, this has NOTHING to do with criminal backgrounds and EVERYTHING to do with race. Now on top of it all we have a bunch of white supremacist goons coming here in a few days to “march” in the most terrorized neighborhoods. My only comfort is that it’s supposed to be single digits next week. Welcome to Minnesota, losers. We saved our best weather just for you.
I’m beyond disgusted with these thugs and those who support this assault on our Constitutional rights, let alone basic human decency. My community is exhausted and fried from stress, and I’m a white person who doesn’t even live in the epicenter. I can’t imagine what many are going through right now who can’t work and have no income, those whose loved ones have been taken or beaten (or murdered), the children who are forever traumatized at the loss of their parents.
But make no mistake–we aren’t backing down. I’ve lived a lot of places in my life, and I have to say they chose the wrong freaking state. People are organizing beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life, and it makes me so damned proud to live in this city. I’ve never loved it more, and I’ll keep fighting for it.
So, please–share the stories, share the videos. Amplify everything you see coming out of this state. The mainstream media is all but dead. Follow Georgia Fort, Mercado Media, Sahan Journal, and independent outlets like Meidas and Courier (just to name a few). Listen and know that it’s got to be all of us fighting this. Wake up to what is really happening…before it comes for you and your communities.
Please copy, and share it that way. The original author does not wish to be identified.
Banner image: Old-fashioned ice at Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. The only kind of ice, Minnesotans want to see. Photo by rod m on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
How does the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr,. whose feast day we celebrated yesterday, assist you as you read this report of truth-telling and non-violent resistance to MAGA’s violence and invasion of an American city?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation, by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox.
3 thoughts on “Report From the Ground in Minneapolis, Part II”
I do relate to the Martin Luther King story. I also bring it forward to Alexei Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir story given that Alexei went willingly to his death remembering Jesus’ return to Jerusalem to challenge the money lenders in the Temple. The author’s mention of Meidas media is relevant to Canada. Our active patriot, Charlie Angus, has been interviewed by MeidasTouch. Angus is leader of MeidasCanada. He has a global following. Yesterday he was interviewed by a London BBC journalist re his response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6-sPyJJt1Y
Monday on Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday, I listened to some of his famous speeches recorded and payed by “Democracy Now!”. I especially recommend his speech on April 4, 2017 at a church in New York City, a year before his martyrdom. In that speech he truthfully assesses the poverty of the moral and spiritual state of America with its social injustices of racism, not only against its own minority and migrant citizens, but its violence around the world (especially the devastating long unjust war against the Vietnamese at the time with horrendous deaths on both sides like any war). Those moral and social inequities of racism, material greed, poverty, and violent militarism have become worse in the US fifty years later, especially under the racist authoritarian regime of Trump, with his enablers of the MAGA movement, wealthy and greedy oligarchs, and sycophantic and cowardly congressional Republicans. The violence being perpetrated on the residents of Minneapolis by Trump’s gestapo ICE (and other American cities) as recorded in the enclosed videos of today’s DM are warnings to all of us American citizens to what happened to German society by Hitler and his racist destructive Nazi movement in the 1930s with its consequent murderous holocaust around the world.
Thank you for sharing this. Prayer may not be enough, but we are praying. And sending letters to defund and disband ICE. Truly they are like Hitler’s brown shirts, and we need to stop our government from using our tax money to support their terrorizing our people.