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Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
inthehands@hachyderm.io ("Paul Cantrell") wrote:

One of my oldest and best friends posted a hell of an account of life in Minneapolis right now.

This whole thing rings so true. “A series of snapshots,” she says — and every one of us here is accumulating our own heavy stack of such snapshots.

Original post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1T31r4jeeX/

Marisa Brandt. January 16. Some notes from Minneapolis these days: There is a before and an after. No, there are multiple befores and multiple afters. Before Christmas, ICE was here, but it wasn't like this. Before I saw one of my neighbors kidnapped on the street less than a block from my house. Before Renee Good was killed. Before I saw the men in tactical gear outside my house. And now. I am looking forward to some new afters. Here are some things I have noticed. Like everyone else, this disaster appears in my mind as a series of snapshots. I can't put it into a coherent narrative. The days blend together, the horrifying incidents and moments of connection both pile on top of each other in a bewildering kaleidoscope. I volunteer with a hospice service. When I went to visit my current hospice client at the home she shares with her daughter and son-in-law, her 70-something daughter was packing up big bags of food to deliver to people sheltering in place in their neighborhood. She had her husband's phone number written in sharpie on her arm in case something happened to her while she was out making deliveries.
At our morning standup, a co-worker in a second-ring suburb shared that over the weekend her husband had been chipping ice off their driveway when a man with no shoes ran up to him. There was a language barrier, so they went inside the heated garage to get google translate up. It turned out the man was running from masked federal agents. My suburban co-worker and her husband hid this man in their garage until the unmarked vans patrolling their neighborhood were gone, gave him some shoes, and drove him somewhere safe. Safer, because nowhere here is safe if you have brown skin. I've been spending part of my mornings standing guard at my local elementary school. (I watch the alley that is in front of the school, because that is one of the places in our neighborhood I have seen ICE agents lurking). I started doing this in mid-December; every week there are more people. We wear safety vests and whistles. People come up to offer help, to see about joining us, to give us money for mutual aid. One woman walked up to us and asked if we could use cash to buy food (we also do food delivery to families that aren't able to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or go to work to earn money to buy groceries). When we said yes, she pulled a thick stack of twenties out of her wallet, handed them to us, and walked away. Our immigrant neighbors thank us, over and over. I am absolutely destroyed by our inability to stop of any of this, to provide anything other than the most basic help.
Literal ice has been a problem as well. A woman slipped and fell while doing school drop-off. She was holding a toddler, and fell right in front of me. I picked up her daughter, who she'd managed to protect as she went down, and reassured her that we would take care of her mom. She was near tears, but holding it together. When the school nurse came out, I said "hey, look, it's the school nurse! she will know just what to do!" and the little girl gave me the most beautiful smile and yelled "YAY!" (Unfortunately, the problem was well beyond the school nurse - her mom had broken her leg in three places.) And on and on. I am so tired. There are many moments of connection with my neighbors, but I would much rather have found another way to create neighborhood bonds. I am ashamed that we didn't build them before this, in all honesty, and that I knew so few of my Somali neighbors. Truly we are all in this together. I don't have any huge conclusion to any of this - it is ongoing, I am still in the middle of it, I can barely process many of the things that have happened over the last few weeks. But I'm hoping to keep getting the word out about what is happening here.