I find myself thinking of the world is generalities. What are the overarching themes of human behavior and why? Or, when are various forms of resistance and action ethical–under what circumstances. What are the nuances of violence, governance, and how do these things contradict themselves. Where they do contradict themselves is where nuance lives, I believe.
I’ve been writing a piece recently I’ve been titling “On Violence”. About it’s justifications. About appealing to the moderate. About how sometimes, some violent offenses are justified in one circumstances and not in another. I’ve been relating it with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. When someone is at the lowest rung with nearly all their needs unmet, they are the most justified to steal or even kill. The second rung mentions safe environments, and lists Tyranny as an unsafe environment. What were the tyrannies of the past, and how can I relate them to current events? What actions are unethical while living in this second rung, and what are? Where does self-defense lay? When can the people under tyranny act violently? When does the United Front for peace become a United Front for resistance of all forms, morally and actually?
As I’ve been struggling with this, the world around me has been slowly becoming more chaotic. Federal agents are flooding the streets and murdering my neighbors. The president of the most powerful country in the world is threatening martial law and the insurrection act to put us in our place. Here in Minneapolis.
The protests after Pretti’s death yesterday were not how I expected them to be. I underestimated the situation. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. The day of Renee Good’s death I tried to find the protests by car at 2:30pm after I finished up some of my work for the day, but the scene of her death, from a block away, seemed to have been cleared up. I saw one police officer herding a handful of people away from the scene but nothing else. This was, I believe, about 6 and a half hours from her death. So when I arrived to the protests yesterday, at 12:30pm, I expected things to have calmed down to a similar degree. But I can’t even say they had calmed down to any degree on January 7th at all. I can’t say.
I had seen the news, the burning dumpsters and the tear gas, but I thought it had been over with. Done.
My friend and I had talked and decided to go out and protest together. There was supposed to be a vigil and rally at 1pm for Alex Pretti. We made it a bit early. Some people were passing us on the way to the intersection where he had died, others were walking back to their cars. I saw people outside their homes handing out LaCroix and snacks to protestors. Water bottles. It felt like a regular non-violent protest. A protest I had experienced before en masse in Iowa City. I related it to the protests I had been a part of within the past year and a half of living here in Minneapolis. Serious, but there was an organization–there were chants and marches.
But as we walked we saw more than I had seen before at a protest. Firefighters hosing down a car which had presumably been set aflame. My friend pointed out more and more people wearing gas masks, too. He said we should put ours on. I had bought some recently, as well as goggles to be extra careful. But even then. Even then I did not believe anything would really happen. I had been coddled and privileged and absent. I knew protests like these had been happening, that people were getting gassed and attacked, brutalized by police, but I had never been there to witness it.
After my friend and I put on our masks and goggles, we marched forward to meet the crowd. Someone with a megaphone was speaking to the crowd, leading chants, sounding off against the fascists in the streets. And suddenly a gas canister was being thrown and the crowd receded like the ocean before a tidal wave. K, my friend, was leading our way back, pulling me back with him carefully, our gloved hands together–following the crowd. “Are you okay?” “Yes, are you?” “Yes.”
Shouts for water began and I looked for my water bottle in my backpack. I carried some snacks, a first aid kit, and my water bottle with me. A person near me was shouting for water for their friend. I went up and tried to help douse her eyes with the water I had been drinking from. I was momentarily sorry that it was water I had drank from–that I had not been ready for the actual eventuality that I’d need to help someone. That clean, purified, bottled water may be a better thing to carry on me than my own water bottle.
I then thought of what I had actually brought. What I had bought at the store. Two sets of goggles and gas masks for K and I, 2×4 plywood boards of various thicknesses because I had heard they can stop rubber bullets, spray paint, and cones to trap tear-gas canisters in. So why did I buy these things if not to use them. I bought these things so I have a responsibility to use them. If I do not use these things, or give them to others to use, it’s simply virtue signaling without action. “I am doing my part” and posting a black square to social media–adding nothing to the conversation. Instead taking away from the revolution. Hurting them. Supplies are not infinite, no matter what capitalism makes us believe. I felt a similar guilt and shame for my actions before Friday, confidently buying thirty pairs of hand-warmers, bringing a box to hold them and my first aid kit to the general strike on Friday, only to lose my courage, my will, to talk to others, to ask or be asked for hand-warmers. I passed others who were doing just such a thing–they brought a wagon to hold it all, or were standing still and giving to those passing by. I did neither of these things, not even having the courage to shout at others to come to me if they had a need. So I handed my hand warmers to the person with the wagon, and kept marching, box in hand, nearly empty now. I tell this not to shame myself, but to help you, the reader, potentially recognize yourself through my own ineptitudes. That I thought I could be everything, I thought I could be the revolutionary, the healer, the writer, etc. But we each serve the cause in our own way. You don’t need to be everything. Find your something and do it well, better than anyone else. I try to write because I know my thoughts are not unique and I want you to share my feelings, my guilts, my shames, my gaffs, and then move past them and grow with me. Not apart from me.
What strikes me, is that after the tear-gas canister was thrown by the police, or whoever was there, they retreated. And my co-marchers marched on. K and I took to the streets again, scared, and moved. Because I was scared, though even still in a state of denial that nothing will happen–despite all the visual evidence of the denied. The dumpsters and trash bins as barricades. The gas still hanging in the air. The traffic cones and plastic drums piling. I grabbed one and moved on. We chanted. We walked. I followed, not seeing where to. And we stopped. An uber driver was driving like normal and we all stopped, confused for a moment. Where are we? Where are we going? “Let’s go back to Nicollet,” someone said, and so we did, joining again a larger crowd of protestors that seemingly materialized while we were gone. There were more people here than I first imagined when I arrived.
My narrative isn’t perfect of the scenes yesterday and the day before. Far from it. I arrived late, and the dangers, seemingly, dispersed after that final tear-gassing. We moved back to known territory for me. Speakers and chants. Testimony of the worst. Calls to action. And I felt more comfortable in the known. Not being able to imagine the damage and danger from hours before I arrived. What had it been like and how could I have helped. How must I meet the moment in the future?
I relate all this then, to help you recognize the need to ask those questions I have been asking myself. When does the need for violence overcome our “moral obligation” to be peaceful? When is it immoral to act peacefully? We fought nazis in the forties. Cheered their deaths. What does a nazi look like today? I’m still writing this piece on violence. But I need to clear the ideas with you first perhaps. Create this conversational space I long for, this written community outside of academia. I got a lot of responses privately from readers (friends and family mostly), but I’d love to start a public forum here with responses and questions back at me and those others in community with me and this “blog”. Most of my network lives outside of the Twin Cities. Like I said, I’ve only been here for a year and a half. I’m still gaining new connections. I’m still slowly coming to love the cities and struggling with the life of an adult who is no longer in college, looking to make friends while all my best friends live far away. What are the thoughts you’re having about Minneapolis now? Do they echo those thoughts you had 5 and a half years ago with George Floyd’s death? Do they remind you of the history of Slave Catchers? Of Nazis or Nazi sympathizers (who are also nazis lets be clear)? Have you ever been here to Minneapolis? Why not? What do you love and mourn for about the midwest, or your own city, or the nation you once thought you knew? What do you love and mourn for your own life, your own comforts, your own privilege or marginalization? It’s not comfortable to talk about these things. Which is why we need to.