Intolerable Things
We'll all be Minneapolis soon.
I thought that Saturday would be a day off. I got basketball tickets. Friday had been Minneapolis’s general strike, which the city’s activists had been frantically planning for more than a week. Tens of thousands of people had marched in the freezing streets. Everyone could use some rest.
Then, yesterday morning, the news broke that ICE had shot someone on Nicollet and 26th Street, outside of a popular donut shop. When I hopped out of a car about an hour later two blocks up from that corner, the first thing I heard were the artillery-like booms of flash bang grenades going off. A wall of tear gas was wafting up Nicollet. Along with several others I retreated a block to a McDonald’s parking lot. People produced water for those who had gotten it bad. After five minutes or so the air cleared enough to walk forward again, towards the line of riot cops that had sealed off the block where the killing happened.
By that time, hundreds of angry people had come out. Some drawn by the news, and some just because all of this was happening where they lived. It is an utterly normal neighborhood of stores and restaurants and tidy houses hunkered down with steaming chimneys, which added to the surreality of it all.
A few things I will always distinctly remember from that morning: A man strolling down Nicollet towards the protest, carrying a leaf blower, to be used to disperse the gas. He looked like he was just going to work. Another day with the leaf blower. He had that leaf blower handy already.
When we met the line of state police who had the street blocked off, I cut through a parking lot to try to go around the block and get closer. When I reached the next street over, another round of tear gas got fired. It sounds like gunfire coming out, and then you see the big white clouds billowing up, and everyone moves quick in the opposite direction. I had a papery N95 mask on, which mostly offers just psychological support against the gas— the better-prepared people had actual respirator masks, which actually work. The cloud came over us and there were a couple of people standing at the open basement entry door of an adjacent apartment building, calling people inside. We all trooped in and up a flight of stairs and people who lived there had a tray of glasses of water out, and a couple of them were standing there with their doors open, welcoming people in to wash their eyes out. Several of us went into a woman named Elizabeth’s studio apartment to drink water. Thank you, Elizabeth.
When that round of gas dispersed I finally got around to 26th Street a block back from the police. The Minnesota state police were the riot cops, and they had riot guns, for shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. The ICE guys were behind them, on Nicollet, and several of them were standing there with long guns. A lot of angry people in the crowd were yelling at the state police: “Why are you looking at us! Turn around and arrest those guys! They just killed a Minnesotan. Who are you protecting?”
People dragged what appeared to be every dumpster and trash can in a five block radius out to 26th street and built a long barrier between all of us and the cops. One clean-cut white guy in his 20s came rushing past, his eyes bulging, speaking out loud in disbelief: “I live here! This is my neighborhood. I live here!”
Down at the front line, after another round of loud ammo had gone off, a woman was waving her arms at an impassive riot cop in a helmet. “Kids live here!” she yelled, pointing at an apartment building. “My kids are here! You’re scaring them! What are you doing?”
The block of 26th Street between Blaisdell and Nicollet had become a sort of no-man’s land between the dumpster barrier and the cops. At one point a couple of young guys piled one of the dumpsters with trash and cardboard boxes, lit it on fire, and began wheeling it towards the line of cops. “Don’t do that! You’re just going to escalate it!” hollered one guy. This was true. But I have to admit it was kind of cool to watch them wheel that dumpster at the cops like a burning ship in a naval battle. We have to retain our ability to chuckle out here.
The state police declared an unlawful assembly and threatened to arrest everyone on the block closest to them. Most of us moved a block back, and there was an uneasy standoff for a while. Then one guy who hadn’t retreated walked back to our corner and said “You all need to move up THIS WAY,” and damned if everyone didn’t move forward and follow him back to the original skirmish line. You had to constantly watch the riot cops to see if they were about to raise their guns or throw a bunch more gas. I only have one coat here and I didn’t want it to get soaked in tear gas too thoroughly. Still, the dumpster barrier did its job.
Minneapolis, Minnesota reminds me of a politically torn, unstable country in a transitional period before full-blown war with a repressive government. Maidan-era Ukraine, for example. That is the vibe. I got an Uber yesterday and the driver said he grew up in Mogadishu in the 90s, and now Minneapolis feels just like it. It is important to understand that all of the people in the streets building barricades and shouting for ICE to get out of their city are not members of some preexisting underground guerilla army sect. They are just regular people. This is what normal day-to-day life in Minneapolis entails now, for anyone with enough integrity to be bothered by city police kidnapping their neighbors. All of the people who have spent countless hours in the past weeks tailing ICE agents on their rounds and filming them and blowing whistles? Regular people. All of the people strapping on their respirator masks and grabbing the leaf blower and hitting the streets to dodge tear gas grenades? Regular people. Alex Pretti and Renee Good, shot and killed by federal agents? Regular people.
Regular people, decent people, faced with intolerable things. That’s who all of the people that you see on the breathless cable news coverage of these protests are. People at the donut store on Saturday morning watch a man get thrown down and shot. People laying in bed on Saturday morning have to throw open their doors to passersby choking on tear gas. People planning to go out to breakfast end up spending all day standing on icy sidewalks hollering at cops in riot helmets. It’s not as if they signed up for this. This is where they live. The federal government has invaded their city with heavily armed, masked secret police. It would be weird if everyone just carried on going to brunch.
Last night, as the sun went down, thousands of people gathered in Whittier Park, outside an elementary school a few blocks down 26th Street from where Alex Pretti was killed. They stood on ice in that freezing field in -10 degree weather for a candlelight vigil. And they were angry. People here are not just mournful. They are fucking mad at the intolerable things that are happening all around them. They are determined. “The only way this ends is with ICE getting the fuck out of Minneapolis,” said one speaker, to huge cheers. I expect that sentiment is shared by just about everyone here.
Watch what is happening in Minneapolis. Watch what they are going through. I’m leaving today, but I don’t think it will matter too much. The rest of America is going to be like Minneapolis before you know it.
Previously from Minneapolis: Cold City, Hot Heart; Hate Has to Scatter When Minneapolis Arises.
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We all already ARE Minneapolis. We just tell ourselves otherwise. Injustice in one place is, in my thought, an injustice everywhere. We just don't know it. We tell ourselves otherwise. We. are. one.
Your reporting is on fire, dear Hamilton. Because of you, we can smell, taste, and see what is going on in the warmest city in the nation. Minneapolis has set the bar high for Americans today. Please stay safe. (And thank you, Elizabeth, and all your neighbors for your corporal works of mercy)