|
 |
Friends,
I rarely post an entire article but this one, from today’s Times, written by Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, is so apt and important to what we’re going through that I felt compelled to share it with you. It’s a wonderful affirmation of something I’ve been saying from the start of these dark days — that through them we will hopefully gain a deeper sense of who we are and what we value, stronger bonds of true patriotism and community, and a more lasting understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. That’s my hope and my faith. The Twin Cities in Minnesota offers an example. In my humble opinion, the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future
Thomas L. Friedman
The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist. It’s not just that I’ve had to watch the Trump administration destroy cherished alliances, like ours with Western Europe and Canada, that have upheld freedom, democracy and global trade since World War II. It’s also been the stunning cowardice and boundless greed with which leaders of big law firms and Big Tech have bent their knees to King Donald and indulged a cabinet of clowns — not one of whom they’d hire in their own businesses.
But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.
It was one of the most courageous battles ever fought by American men and women not in uniform. It was led by moms ready to donate their breast milk to strangers and dads ready to drive someone else’s kids to school because the parents, terrified of ICE agents, were too afraid to go out outdoors. It was neighbors ready to hit A.T.M.s to help out neighborhood restaurants and businesses deciding not to open — thus forgoing their income — for fear that masked ICE agents might drag away their cooks or dishwashers or desk clerks.
And the best part was this: At a time when we have a president so shameless that he insists on putting his name on every public building he can, these good Samaritans of all colors and creeds acted without fanfare. “There were hundreds of leaders of this movement,” Bill George, a longtime Twin Cities business executive, said to me, “and I don’t know a single one of their names.”
Many surely got to know one another, though, because they were all propelled by a verb I’d never heard before: “neighboring,” as in, Today I will be neighboring — going out to protect the good people next door or down the block. Not because I favor illegal immigration, but because I oppose the fundamental indecency of President Trump and Stephen Miller and the blessedly now departed Kristi Noem trying to fulfill their daily quota for evicting illegal immigrants by arresting my neighbors, most of whom work hard, pay taxes, go to church or mosque and help me dig out my car from the snow in winter.
Here’s some free advice for Trump and Miller: Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighborliness — not everywhere, not always, but in a lot of places on a lot of days. Its power is rooted in its ordinariness — just a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbors and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.
Observing it up close made me think about what Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in January: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Well, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the real world after all, because your private ICE army — “governed by strength” and “force” — was sent packing by a bunch of moms and dads armed only with cellphone cameras and whistles, ready to walk out on a freezing morning in bathrobes and bunny slippers, to defend their neighbors, some of whom they barely knew.
Yes, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the “real world” after all, because the real score here is Neighboring, 1. Trumpism, 0.
Virtually every person I spoke with had at least one remarkable story. In fact, I have not heard so many stories of either incredible cruelty by men and women with guns or incredible kindness by neighbors and strangers for one another since I covered the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s.
To fully appreciate what is so new and special, though, you probably need to have grown up here. I was born in 1953 on the Northside of Minneapolis, a few miles from where George Floyd was killed, and back in my childhood everything seemed binary: You were either white or Black, Christian or Jewish, et cetera. Minnesota was roughly 99 percent white. By 2023, however, the state was 76 percent white, with Black, Hispanic, Asian and other minorities all making up a far bigger share of the population than in my youth.
That is a lot of demographic change. Indeed, in the mid-1970s, my aunt, who lived in Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, took me aside one evening during a family event and furtively whispered, “Tom, I was in the grocery store on Saturday and I heard someone speaking Spanish.” It was a first for her. She never forgot it, and neither did I. Willmar was almost entirely white when she moved there in the late 1940s. Today it is 59 percent white and has vibrant Somali and Latino communities.
The state economy could not thrive without immigrants — legal and illegal — as producers and consumers. Immigrants make up some 11 percent of the Minnesota work force today, and about 16 percent of the state’s manufacturing work force is foreign-born.
Bruce Corrie, a professor emeritus of economics at Concordia University, remarked in a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio that Trump’s rant claiming Somali immigrants “contribute nothing” could not be more wrong. “Foreign-born workers make Minnesota affordable, wealthy, productive,” Corrie said, “whether we’re eating out or getting our roof fixed.” He estimates that immigrant workers and businesses contribute $26 billion annually to Minnesota’s economy.
But, I repeat, there has been a lot of demographic change, very fast. The other morning, I took an Uber to visit my Somali American friend Hamse Warfa, head of a very creative education nonprofit, World Savvy, at his office in St. Paul. My Uber driver was also Somali. Her name was Huda, and, she told me, she has an adult child in the U.S. Air Force.
I thought to myself: Huda is taking Tom to see Hamse in St. Paul, where the new mayor is a Laotian Hmong refugee woman. Welcome to Minnesota circa 2026. Go Vikings!
That is the demographic and economic backdrop to Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. Beginning in December, Trump and Noem poured 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents into the Minneapolis-St. Paul region to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. That federal force, whose poorly trained foot soldiers eventually shot and killed two citizen observers, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dwarfed the local police force in number. In announcing the operation, Trump ranted that Somali immigrants were “garbage,” that “these aren’t people who work” or say “let’s make this place great.”
Trump’s view of Somali Minnesotans was, no doubt, shaped in part by the fact that nearly 80 individuals, most of them Somali immigrants, have been indicted and at least 57 of them convicted for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from government food programs. That fraud was a shameful moral failure by its perpetrators and a shameful management failure by Gov. Tim Walz, but Trump’s attempt to tar all 80,000 Somali Americans and Somalis in Minnesota, and other immigrants, generally to justify his federal invasion into the Land of Lakes has turned out to be a huge mistake, and, in my view, a racist one.
While church and other civic groups had built some organizational foundations in case ICE came to Minneapolis — after seeing what federal forces had done in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles — it is safe to say that no one anticipated the spontaneous upsurge of neighboring that exploded in the Twin Cities and eventually forced Trump into a humiliating withdrawal.
“Trump expected that the protests against ICE would be dominated by antifa or violent leftists and that they would become the damnable face of the resistance and the face of Minneapolis,” and therefore “legitimize” Trump’s invasion, Don Samuels, a Black former city councilman, told me.
But what happened instead, said Samuels, was that many everyday middle-class white Minnesotans turned out “to share risk and leadership of the resistance with their brown and Black neighbors.”
As the whole rainbow of Minnesotans watched their Hispanic, Hmong and Somali neighbors — some of them their local shopkeepers, small-business owners, carpenters or cooks — being violently pulled out of homes, restaurants and construction sites, Samuels noted, the popular reaction was: “I can’t believe this is happening in America — they killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood!”
Black and brown residents, many less likely to be as confrontational in their interactions with ICE, told their white neighbors: This is what we’ve been dealing with forever!
And so, suddenly, Samuels added, Trump and ICE found themselves “fighting the people they thought they were supposed to be saving America for”: white moms and dads and college students appalled by the obvious cruelty of federal agents dragging away their neighbors.
“This was Minnesota standing up — not being just ‘nice’ but being good and courageous and unified,” said Samuels. “Something was born in this crisis that could never have been born on a good day. Otherness has been replaced with kinship between brown, Black and white Minneapolitans.”
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota, told me, “We broke out of bowling alone,” referring to Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone,” about how communities in America had fragmented. “The concept of neighbors meeting neighbors has come back,” he said. “The idea of community was present again. I was at Costco the other day and a woman, she was white, just came up and asked if she could hug me.”
Members of two Minneapolis congregations — Shir Tikvah, a Reform synagogue, and San Pablo/St. Paul Lutheran Church — shared two services together, on Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, as a show of solidarity following the immigration siege. Then they jointly raised