Chaos and Grace, too

Yes, there’s shocking chaos in Minneapolis and Minnesota. ICE and CBP agents appear in abrupt and violent – and lethal – outbursts and then disappear to terrorize another community. The suddenness and unpredictability of these confrontations stoke the fear and intensify the cruelty of imposed helplessness. Even so, the oft-repeated generalization about the chaos in my city overlooks so much of what else is happening here.

Here’s my immediate experience: more volunteers than one school can use to pack groceries for people hiding out at home (many more, actually); mountains of food delivered to a church for redistribution; volunteers driving teachers to/from school; oversubscribed constitutional observer training sessions; bookstores saving up poster-sized pieces of cardboard, gray-haired protestors standing on a street corner in a snow squall; baristas showing up on that same corner with carafes of coffee; children sewing pillows with loving messages to tuck into some of those grocery bags; boxes of hand warmers, bottles of water, a few Hostess cupcakes, a shrine of stethoscopes all left near the site of Alex Pretti’s killing; Somali men offering chai, teenagers passing out pizza, an African-American choir showing up at the site of Renee Good’s killing. And then, of course, there were the 50,000+ who marched peacefully in sub-zero temperatures and the impromptu demonstrators showing up on highway overpasses, the singing resisters and praying resisters and silently crying witnesses, the orchestra’s changed program, every knitting store in town sold out of red yarn. Candles. Flowers. Handcrafted signs. Doughnuts. Baskets of free whistles. And I only know a small part of what is going on in my city and my state.

This layer of community and care is growing beneath the chaos, a reminder of the power of love coupled with fierce determination.

Annette Atkins