January Scribbles
This is about Minnesota.
Scribble(s)
My brain has been malfunctioning lately.1 Right around turning 39, just a couple of weeks ago, it felt like my mind kept glitching. I got in the car and couldn’t remember where I was going2, forgot to bring my daughter to dance until she reminded me and we literally ran out the door, and can’t remember basic words. “Maybe this is what 39 is like,” I thought, “This is how the end begins.” But then I remembered the other thing that happened around turning 39: the shooting of Renee Good. ICE, everywhere. Pain, also everywhere. And then: another shooting, Alex Pretti. In my city, which is still my city even if I live in a suburb 20 minutes to the North.
It’s bad. It’s as bad as you think. Maybe worse. Every day, I receive messages or emails from our schools, restaurants, businesses in the community about the impacts. A friend of mine teaches in an elementary school where 50% of their students are staying home due to their parents’ concerns for their safety. I receive other messages about where we can donate money, food, our time. A fellow swim team mom texted that her daughter wouldn’t be going to our usual swim location because she was concerned about the presence of ICE in that particular suburb. It gave me pause, but we still went. As we left that night, I noticed flashing lights across the way, in the parking lot of what I think is a hotel. Were they right there? Was that them?3
And I feel silly even saying all the above because I’m fine. We’re fine. I’m a white woman!4 Please ignore my Suburban White Woman Tears. The impacts on myself and my family have been relegated to text messages and emails. We get to help—my church has turned into a donation storage site for piles upon piles of food and household goods. I don’t need to keep my kids home. In some ways, it could be in another city, any snowy city: Boston, Denver, Des Moines. ICE agents haven’t shown up on my street. (Yet?) But they have in other suburbs, other neighborhoods that look very similar to mine. They’ve shown up to restaurants that look like the ones I frequent, at schools that look like our schools, and at businesses I’ve visited. I’ve brought my kids to the donut shop across the street from where Alex Pretti was murdered. My daughter was supposed to go to a birthday party only a block or two away, which had to be moved to another location. In so many ways, this is very real for us.
I’m so proud of Minnesotans. I’m proud of us for showing up, nonviolently and peacefully. I’m proud of us for organizing donations and ICE patrols and protests. I’m proud of us for showing the country, and the world, exactly how to handle Donald Trump’s administration of bullies. I hate that we have to. But I’m so proud that we have.
Around the Internet
First things first: if you would like to donate to the mutual aid organization that my church is partnering with for the duration of the ICE occupation (or longer!), you can do so here.
How Minnesota’s Civic Culture fueled a tough ICE resistance and took the feds by surprise: “the federal cowboys who flooded Minnesota streets actually ran headfirst into the state’s formidable civil society — a network of civically engaged people and organizations that makes this a risky place for the federal government to pick a fight with its own citizens. And the bold response has set an example for the rest of the country that may complicate the Trump administration stomping on some other state.”
What Should Americans Do Now? “I’m tempted to believe that the country will somehow return to normal, because I want it to be normal. We’ve never been here before, and either the nervous system overreacts or the imagination fails. After Minneapolis, I fear the latter more. Trump is taking the country on a path to tyranny. The first obligation for each of us is to see it and name it. The next is to figure out what to do about it.”
Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong: “If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it ‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that ‘it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’’ Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.”
Follows: my internet friend Elizabeth Berget is sharing so much good information about her area of Minneapolis and beyond. MNAngryMan is everyone’s favorite protester. timevenasphoto is one of my favorite photojournalist follows.
Put all the edits of Minnesotans directly in my veins. I would like to frame the first photo in this carousel because it never fails to make me swell with pride. A Blue Bunny Hat, A Spider-Man Backpack. My own contribution: When I ask my 9-year-old if he knows what ICE officers are.
Eating
When everything feels impossible and you face day after day of sub-zero temperatures, what you fill your table with is comfort food.
These Swedish Meatballs5
No-Knead Bread to pair with your soup of choice
This Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe6
Fun Things
Also, when everything feels impossible, what you do is surround yourself with cozy things. (Granted, surrounding myself with cozy things is my preferred state of being. This only intensifies that need.)
My new favorite sweatshirt, which I will be wearing on repeat for the month of February. I sized up one size and it’s a perfect oversized fit.
A couple of game recs: Hues and Cues and Jelly Fish Toast & Jam. With a family of five, we love a game that can have more than four players.
White Barn candles really are fantastic. The burn is always perfectly even and the scents (at least of the ones I’ve used) are nice but not overpowering. I’ve been lighting one each evening around 6 or 7 in remembrance of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all those affected by ICE. There have been vigils big and small throughout the Twin Cities all week, and this is one little thing to help remind me that I’m a part of a bigger whole. ❤️
Treat this entire thing as a brain dump, please and thank you.
Three kids in a half-dozen activities might also do this to you.
It was. I have since learned that the hotel area across the way is a popular staging area for ICE vehicles and officers.
Well, so was Renee Good.
Pro tip: I buy the frozen Swedish Meatballs from Target instead of making my own.
Made these at least twice this month. Mine don’t turn out “big and fat” as the title suggests, but are perfectly crunchy at the edges and soft in the middle. Do yourself a favor and chop your chocolate of choice up first. Yum.
Thinking of you so much, friend. These reflections were honest and beautiful. All the love for MN ♥️
Thank you for this. For the wholeness of it: the reality, the life, the recipes, all of it. We're all thinking of you and your neighbors constantly.