The last two months here in Minneapolis have been beyond educational… maybe “astonishing” is the right word.
Faced with an unprecedented occupation of the city and its surroundings by armed and hostile federal agents, using law enforcement as a pretext for terrorizing the city and coercing the state, neighbors have come together rapidly. Organizing has been bottom-up. Think blocks coming together under block captains, neighborhoods making plans at potlucks. The keyword here is “hyperlocal”—grocery deliveries, rent support, safe rides to medical appointments, carpooling kids to school, all of that is happening all over the city but largely executed by people for their near neighbors.
My neighborhood held a meeting last weekend that was intended to give us a sort of break from the endless organizing, volunteering, and delegating. We had a potluck in a church basement, maybe fifty people. We spent time getting to know each other by name and face. And then we had a poetry reading—like a slam but without competition. Five pre-scheduled speakers and then an open mike time, reading poems of anger, of grief, of hope, even of grace.
I’ve never attended a performance so cathartic. I was amazed to hear the tender composition of a neighbor who is a dad-down-the-street from me, who signed up for the open mike. I thought to myself if I had a poem, it would be something like
Once I asked God to take my heart of stone
and give me a heart of flesh.
Neighbors, I am sorry,
and my heart thanks you.
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If you had told me even six months ago that I would decide to spend three hours on a Sunday afternoon at a neighborhood amateur poetry reading, I would never, ever have believed you.
There is something about what is happening in Minneapolis that I am having trouble reconciling with my previous experiences.
I feel like I fit into the cities of the Upper Midwest, culturally, much better than I ever did where I grew up in suburban southwestern Ohio. (Note that I can’t really speak to the rural areas or the smaller towns.)
People are a little more aloof and reserved here. They keep a little bit of distance. They mind their own business. Small talk is brief and non-intrusive. For a somewhat socially awkward introvert, this is wonderful. Plenty of personal space, plenty of room to exist in my own head. In some ways, moving through the public spaces here actually feels a little similar to moving through New York City, where tightly packed human beings compensate for limited physical space by creating a sort of psychic personal space for themselves and for each other.
There are stereotypical downsides to this aloofness. An old joke goes that Minnesotans are so nice, we will gladly give you directions to anywhere except our own house. New arrivals, especially those unused to the culture, can find it is hard to make new friends. For a time a few years ago, we tentatively joined a new parish (in a first ring suburb!)—and a year and a half later we decided to find a new one, having learned not a single other family’s names. Minnesotans are famously indirect in criticism. “That’s different” or “that’s interesting” can indicate anything from mild shock to a state of being absolutely appalled.
(If you want a taste of this view, there’s an old parody film called How to Talk Minnesotan which is definitely parody and also accurate. It’s available on YouTube.)
But we also all shared a certain pride in getting through the winters together, in digging each other’s cars out and clearing each other’s sidewalks. There is a neighborliness that expects little and offers what it can, when it sees the need.
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So having lived here a while I had developed a sort of affection for, and affiliation with, the Minnesota way (except for the refusal to speak bluntly about problems). The aloofness and reservedness, and tendency not to make fast friends, I felt that I understood and was comfortable with, as I felt free from a pressure to perform socially or to commit to any roles.
I lived on a pleasant and modest block in South Minneapolis for about 23 years, and in all that time I barely got to know the people living around me. I vaguely knew the few families that had kids, I knew the neighborhood dogs, I waved and said hi, I greeted them when I served as an election judge. After 2020, things got a little friendlier: the neighborhood organizations started a block-captain program, and some families set up a Signal chat that our block used to discuss lost cats and misdelivered packages and kids’ fundraisers and jumper cables. Through the chat I learned a handful of names and faces.
And then…
2026 happened, and the federal agents showed up to seize some of my neighbors, and—the aloofness, the personal space, the reservedness—it just completely evaporated.
Gone!
Emergency block meetings. Emergency neighborhood potlucks. Division into teams: teams for care and support, teams for communications, teams for neighborhood watch, teams for letter-writing and fundraising and boycotts. Minnesotans giving rides in their own cars to perfect strangers, ferrying them to medical appointments or legal offices. Neighborhood dads walking one child of their own and three children not their own safely to school. Churches inviting volunteers of all kinds to sort and pack groceries, and more volunteers to pick them up and deliver them to homes. People using their own Venmo accounts to raise money from friends and redistribute it to neighbors who otherwise couldn’t pay their rent; donors trusting those folks to handle the money honestly.
Two observers shot dead. At least one in ten Minneapolis residents stepping up to receive training in legal observation, stepping up to stand in the shoes of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Sometimes for the sake of neighbors they knew and cared for, personally.
Often for the sake of neighbors they did not previously have ties to any stronger than the casual ones I had with mine.
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Before this, I never so much as invited a neighbor to tea. Today, I am literally ready to be tear-gassed for any person on my block, for any child at the neighborhood school. And there are few of us who haven’t accepted, one way or another, the grim possibility of another death.
My perceptions before the occupation were not false. The reservedness was real. But this fierce mutual defense, this taking on of real bodily risk, this palpable answer to who is my neighbor? is also real.
I’m forced to conclude that there is some consistency underlying both of these seemingly incompatible visions of my community.
I think it is respect. Simple, neighborly respect.
Respecting boundaries, respecting privacy, respecting that your ways and my ways may be “different”—and that this is all that is worth saying about them, at least in public. Living pleasantly alongside one another as human neighbors do.
We do have at least one thing in common, by definition. We chose this community to be our own. That is a real and true connection in any neighborhood.
And when a force comes in that speaks ill, not just of some of our neighbors, but of the very idea of our neighborliness—
when the Vice President of the United States sneers at the idea that we can live happily alongside people who are of a different economic class or speak different languages or practice different faiths—
Well.
That is the opposite of respect.
We are—and this is hard to do to a Minnesotan—offended.
And all our stubbornness and our hardiness turn to a collective fury, driven to prove how very, very wrong that image of us is.
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I hope we can live up to this drive in the aftermath. Our economy is damaged. People’s nest eggs are depleted. Even after the immediate damage is over, neighbors will need help: from the trauma, from the legal fees, from evictions, from medical complications. I hope we will step up and keep lifting each other up, long after the attention turns elsewhere.
Whether we win the Nobel Peace Prize or not.
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