Meanwhile, in Minneapolis...
Excerpt from an interesting commentary...
...This Is Not Victory Dancing
Let me be careful here.
A man is still dead.
Families are still grieving.
Investigations are ongoing.
Nobody “won.”
But restraint…prevented something worse.
And that deserves acknowledgment.
The loudest voices online predicted fire.
Instead, what we saw was focus.
The difference between those two outcomes…is the difference between escalation and de-escalation.
History turns on those margins...
A disciplined city refused to hand over the excuse—and now ICE is reportedly drawing down.
www.jackhopkinsnow.com
I fear they might have gotten their insurrection, if they had done Portland, Oregon, first.
Now, with that tremendously courageous and patient Minnesota example, if Noem's goon squad does come after my state next, as was rumored to be the plan, people know what to do and how to behave.
I hope.
But let's remember the terrible economic and social cost to Minnesota -- it is high and it is generational. And many people, including kids, are still disappeared. Some are dead or injured.
The politics of division grows bitter fruit. Much better, the old-style politics of compromise, deals, and at least lip service to decency and the public trust.
But what we are seeing today really isn't politics. It is an existential threat to everything the US has stood for for centuries.
Trump has betrayed MAGA, making no bones about it by very publicly welcoming that socialist Mr. Mamdani in the Oval Office on the day the Honorable Taylor Greene announced her resignation.
And a bunch of creeps who are okay with pedophilia and other crimes really are trying to turn this country to the current Russia model, while a surprising number of confused American snobs and others lacking a moral compass are enabling it; we all really do need to take an individual stand on that. Over and over again, because this isn't going to go away any time soon unless Congress develops a spine and starts impeaching all the officials who so obviously need it.
We the People, meanwhile,
need a positive message, a confirmation of happy endings, an optimism in activism -- and most of all, a good place to head for out of this mess.
Just off the top of my head, I know of only one influential living American who is stepping up to this (although there undoubtedly are many others that we can find whenever we get the courage to go looking for them):
As for past Americans, especially this month...
...that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time...was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it...
--
Abraham Lincoln, 1861
It's okay to care. America wouldn't be America without that.