Shutting Down Minnesota

A piece by Robert Reich is posted earlier today. Robert reports on Minnesota’s reaction to ICE’s efforts in Minneapolis to take control. ICE aggression and harassment of the citizenry is not going over well. People are angry and are pushing back. The citizenry are calling for a shutdown of the state.

Given the nature and plight of citizens in Minnesota, I suspect they will succeed to some extent. Masked and armed, officials can not act aggressively and attack people, take them captive without a warrant or cause, invade their homes, murder someone as the aggressor, and expect to be ignored.

The results are people reacting to the interference and aggressive and illegal behavior Trump and ICE are bringing to their lives.

Minnesota’s General Strike, and America’s

Robert Reich

Friends,

Today, Minnesota is shutting down in solidarity.

It’s the nation’s first general strike in response to Trump’s thuggery.

Across the state, businesses are closed. People are not shopping. Workers have stayed home or called in sick. Labor unions are encouraging work stoppages. Residents are helping one another. It’s an economic blackout.

Organizers are calling it a “Day of Truth and Freedom.”

It could be a model for what the nation as a whole does in coming months, to repudiate the Trump dictatorship.

Ana Marie Cox, writing in yesterday’s TNR, noted that Minnesota is a natural leader for this kind of thing. “It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snow blowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency.”

Cox goes on to say: “People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, ‘Just pay it back someday.’ Of course you will — everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern micro-distance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.”

That’s the predicate for the ground-level resistance, and widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation. It offers one reason why the mobilization in Minneapolis has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder.

As Cox says, “It’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.”

The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in a dozen other Minnesota mutual-aid traditions: Lutheran churches seeded what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.

Cox urges us to look around our own neck of the woods. Our own communities might need us to help seed a little resilience — now, before a crisis arrives to consume us and even if it’s not in a sub-Arctic clime.

This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on Naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.

Most importantly: Sign up for the ICE watch that’s happening near you. Because almost certainly, ICE is already there. What Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next. How Minneapolis is responding should be our template too.