High Street UU Church,
February 15, 2026
I used to live
about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. My wife says that when I start out with
something like that, I should give fair warning that I’m about to tell you an
amusing anecdote about myself. But this isn’t amusing and as you’ll see I’m
peripheral to the story. Like today, a lot of protests and rallies were
happening in the Twin Cities. Most I attended were uneventful, but in September
2008 the Republican National Convention came to town. Joining about 10,000
others on the streets of St Paul, I took with me a young member of my
congregation. Keith had been to some protests in his sleepy Wisconsin town but not
a large gathering or one with a sizable police presence. I suggested to him
before we got out of the car he should leave his backpack of cigarettes and
jacket, phone, instruments, and homemade signs in the car. But he was sure he’d
need them.
We joined the
anarchist contingent, a part of which was the so-called “black bloc,” the
masked protesters dumping trash cans, breaking windows, setting small fires.
One group eventually set a police cruiser on fire. I didn’t join them. I
believe destruction gets you nothing except bad publicity, but I understand also
publicity has its place.
Keith and I got
separated soon after arrival and later I saw him do a brave thing. There was a
large group of protestors at one end of a street and on the other end a large
group of police. Now it’s a common sight today to watch videos from Minneapolis
and Portland and Seattle and see all these militarized, armed cops in tactical
gear and helmets, but in 2008 it was new. I stood with a part of the crowd at
one end of the street, observing the standoff, when suddenly Keith emerged from
the crowd. He walked to a point about midway between the two groups and sat
down on the street. He sat in the lotus position, opening his arms to the cops,
miming “Why?” Believe it or not, this had an ameliorating effect on the cops. They
were ordered back a few blocks and the protestors marched further.
I saw a lot of
things, places being vandalized, tear gas unleashed. Famously, a police car was
burned. One protestor who’d thought to bring his own gas mask put it on and was
surrounded and pummeled by the police about 20 feet away from where I stood. I
stayed upwind avoiding the group collecting on the Wabasha Street bridge. There’s
a police tactic called kettling, allowing a group to herd themselves into an
area, then cutting off the means to and from that area, effectively boxing the
group in. Most of those on the bridge were arrested.
There’s more to
this day I’d relate but I’m talking about Keith, so I’ll skip to the end. After
his action on the street, I didn’t see Keith again and when I returned to the
car at our agreed-on time, he wasn’t there. I waited another hour before I
called his cell phone, and it rolled into voicemail. I left a message and then
drove the streets looking for him. Many streets were blocked off, however, so I
knew there was a chance I wouldn’t find him. About 10 that night I called his
mom and reported I hadn’t found him and needed to leave, as I had an 8 AM class
next morning. She said she and her wife and her ex-husband, Keith’s father,
would drive over and start looking.
Here’s the story
as I heard it later. The three of them drove around the now-opened streets of
Minneapolis until 3 when they found him wandering one of the streets with a
small group of other teens. He’d been arrested a few blocks away from where I’d
last seen him while getting a lighter out of his backpack. I knew that backpack
was bad business. He’d been pressed down so hard by the cop he had a boot
indentation on his back. Somewhere I still have a picture of it. He’d been
taken to juvenile and kept in lockup for at least 8 hours. Juveniles don’t
receive the fabled one phone call and his cell had long since died.
The cops remained
on the streets of Minneapolis for about a week. The image of at least 2 officers
armed with semi-automatics and bulletproof vests on every corner became a daily
sight.
Here’s why I’m
telling you this story. As nasty as the 2008 elections were—you remember the
election? Sarah Palin was a Donald trump without either the charisma or the
cash. John McCain referred to Barak Obama as “That one” in the second debate
but made up for it by interrupting his own supporters’ allegations to describe
him as “a decent family man with whom I have some disagreements.” Leading up to
the election and after, Obama was described as anything from a secret Muslim, a
Kenyan by birth, to the Antichrist. During the crackdown on the protestors that
lasted a week, dozens were arrested. Some were hurt. But no one was killed.
Other than gas masks when they deployed gas, I never saw a masked cop. Every
one of them had his badge on the outside of his gear; Keith’s family eventually
sued the officer who’d used excessive force in arresting him and we knew who
she was because someone had taken a picture of her and her badge. My court
appearance on Keith’s behalf was the first time I’d worn my brand-new clerical
collar. People were hurt. No one died. As messy as things got, as adrenalized
as everyone was.
Rush forward 18
years and things have changed. We look at one another and at ourselves
differently. In under a year we have gone from, well, maybe not a Capraesque
Bedford Falls, but it’s hard to deny we’re living in some version of
Pottersville. You might remember in Bedford Falls there was a sizable community
of hardworking immigrants, but there are no visible immigrants of any kind in
Pottersville.
In
my instance, I’ve come to see myself differently than before. I’m angry
sometimes, at nothing in particular or at nothing I can identify. I avoid the
news, and when I don’t I doomscroll. I brood. I don’t brood well. My brooding
is less Heathcliff on the moors and more Charlie Brown reflecting on his team’s
156th consecutive loss. “Rats.” I snipe at people whose only crime
is being related to people who continue to support trump. I don’t think of
myself as depressed, rather as echoing the poet of the Biblical Book of
Lamentations who writes, “My eyes! My eyes! They stream with tears! How far from me is anyone to
comfort, anyone to restore my life. My children are desolate; the enemy has
prevailed.”
In his
“autobiographical sketch” of his childhood, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,”
Richard Wright’s there was a clear distinction between the Black and white
children. Among other things, Black children threw clumps of railway cinders at
one another in play, while white boys were allowed to throw broken bottles at
them. Young Richard catches one of these projectiles in his neck, requiring
three stitches.
When night fell,
my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet
her…I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound,
then slapped me.
“How come yuh
didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh always fightin’?”
I was outraged,
and bawled. Between sobs I told her I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide
behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t
throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She
grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I
had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave,
and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I
was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight in any more wars. I
was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again, and they
were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn’t I know
she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make
money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She
couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to
be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t kill me.
What’s happening
to me, at least partly, is my disheartening realization that this
self-identification with the authorities like Richard’s mother is something we
have already seen. Hispanics, Blacks, and women have all joined the Border
Patrol and ICE and are, maybe not unilaterally, but sufficiently content with
their orders and their targets. My fantasy solution is suggested by the line of
a song by The Devil Said Jump. These MFers are gonna “Make Me Buy a Gun.” So
far, it remains fantasy because I’m really too much the coward and pacifist to do
that. But I will admit I’ve looked up the price of high-end long-distance
slingshots. My rationale around that is to echo that of the pastoral character
Shepherd Book of the TV series Firefly. When the ship is attacked by government
agents and along with everyone else onboard he picks up a gun to fight back, he
is asked, facetiously, whether there isn’t something specific in the Bible
about killing, he answers, “Quite specific. It is, however, much fuzzier on the
subject of kneecaps.”
My point is it can
be done, it has been done, without people dying or being maimed. We can’t
support a government that acts out of the barrel of a gun. We will not support
such a government, we will not forgive such a government, we will remember the
government that did this and the people who cheered it on or who, at best,
ignored that it was happening. People point out, rightly, if we, by which I
mean the predominantly white liberal community, had refused to allow the
government to behave this way with Black citizens, Asian citizens, Native
Americans, we would not be dealing with the government treating people this way
now. Yes, 20-20 hindsight and all that, but there’s at least a salt lick’s
worth of truth to that.
I quoted
Lamentations earlier. Now I quote the Psalms: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed
in spirit.” We can surely use some of that certainty, can’t we, the surety of UU
minister Wayne Arneson who wrote “Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never
clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is
another truth: you are not alone.
It may be time, may be past time, to cut loose MAGA from
political thought. Remember the John Birch Society? There’s an argument to be
made that Bircherism is echoed by contemporary Trumpism. Long thought dead, it
declined in membership from a high in the 1960s of 100,000 to somewhere in the
hundreds. It isn’t just numbers. More Americans profess belief in UFOs than
voted for Trump—yes, I looked that up—and we don’t take them into political
account. They have set themselves outside society. It’s time to metaphorically
vote them off the island. I remember during the first trump administration
coming across the comment that the only things that would separate most of his
supporters from him would be finding a dead woman or a live child in his bed,
and there was some question about the dead woman. With each day revealing more
evidence, it is obvious the live child makes no difference either.
Am I suggesting we drop those people from our lives? In so
many words, I am. It’s possible to love someone and hate his actions. I used to
teach in the Minnesota prison system. I liked my students. They were
personable. I didn’t ask anyone what his crime was because, a, that’s not
something you ask a person, and b, I wasn’t so certain I’d like them after
finding out. They looked forward to class days and did all the work because it
was a way, as one inmate put it to me, “to remind me my life isn’t just punishment.”
One of my best students and a favorite of mine insisted one
evening on telling me why, in his early 20s, he had a life sentence. Without
putting too much of a spin on it, he told me he’d raped and killed a young girl
in his mid-teens. I had to sort out for myself whether I wanted to keep him in
class. I had that kind of power, to drop anyone from class if I felt their
contributions ran counter to it. It was a week of some soul searching, and I
decided that despite how I felt about his crime, he had earned an opportunity
to better himself. It is the same kind of self-questioning anyone with a
father, brother, mother, sister, cousin in prison must ask themselves.
I like to think he
took some comfort in that, that as bad as he had made his life he could read
and talk about good books. I would rewrite the benediction of Reverend Arneson
from “Take courage, friends” to “Take comfort.” Where do I take comfort? I take
comfort in the love of my family. I take comfort in my animals, the dogs and
cats who make up my pack. I take comfort in my work, helping people. I take
comfort in my daily walk around my neighborhood, greeting the dogs and cats,
and yes, even my neighbors who wear red caps. I take comfort in my activism, in
showing up to rallies and protests and marches. I rarely help to organize these
and less often speak at them, taking my comfort instead by being a part of the
crowd, a quiet body standing in solidarity with like-minded people. It reminds
me I am not alone. I take comfort in the words of fellow Unitarian TheodoreParker, that “The arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But if we would see justice
come in our lifetimes we must lean on one end.
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