Empowering And Encouraging Our Neighbors In Minneapolis

To all our Minneapolis fellow citizens -

Tragically, once again your city is being torn apart by the heinous crimes of the very people you hired to protect you. My deepest sympathy to all of you for the heartache you must be suffering as you watch the city you love and call home judged for the horrific acts of a few. Amidst all of the (justified) outrage directed at those four police officers, their bosses and fellow officers, the painful history of similar violence in your city, and the elected officials you’ve assumed would do something to finally stop this longstanding division, I imagine you are filled with your own sense of outrage, sadness, shame, and what must feel most painful of all, futility. Helplessness is torture when so much is on the line. For all of your pain and confusion, I’m sorry. The world genuinely mourns your losses and ruptures with you. And at the same time, it’s hard not to wonder about...

How...the very soul of your city is now on life-support. How you navigate this time will define Minneapolis’s reputation for years to come. The accumulated total of these crimes now spans way beyond an age-old series of unrelated misfortunes. Tragically, the bone-chilling horror we all watched on that video as George Floyd took his last breath under the knee of a callous, stoic Derek Chauvin will forever define the face of your city. Now, to the world watching, that’s all Minneapolis is. And I have no doubt that as someone who loves and is proud of your city, raised your family there, perhaps for generations, that reality seems harshly unfair and is bitterly maddening.

What will you do now?

Do you just throw your hands up and simply resign yourselves to the fact that the beautiful city of Minneapolis is damned to become the face of racism in America? Do you live in the torment, most especially if you are white, of believing to your core that you don’t wish ill toward anyone of color, and resent being associated with that ignorance? Do you join the protesters in their fires, looting, white-hot enraged marches, who feel powerless with no other options, in the hope that someone will finally listen and do something? Do you sign petitions and speak words of righteous indignation over coffee with friends? Or do you just accept this is a blight on your city’s identity, and hope that it doesn’t happen “too many more times?”

Just how personal do you let this get?

How far beyond arm’s length can you keep this in order to maintain your sanity, to sustain your pride in a city that has so many otherwise beautiful features and stories? Certainly agonizing questions you now face. Such choices are understandable temptations given that the problem seems much deeper and wider than any one of you likely feels you can impact.

But that’s where you would be wrong.

It’s precisely those conclusions that keep this painful scourge part of your city. There are almost half a million of you there. United, you could be an unimaginable force for change. That potential has always been within you. Jacob Frey works for you. You are his boss. Medaria Arradondo works for you. You are his boss. DA Mike Freeman works for you. You are his boss. Officers Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng all worked for you. What form justice now takes is your choice. The future reputation of Minneapolis is in your hands.

What happens next is your decision.

The nation of Germany (from where approximately 39% of you share a heritage) has made it their immovable mission to learn from the atrocities of their history. The words “never again” are imprinted at every location commemorating the horrors of the holocaust. Regrettably, America has refused to come to terms with our enduring legacy of cruelty in so many forms toward the African American community. As a white man, this wholly confounds me. I understand how the social psychologists explain it. I get how the sociologists and evolutionists theorize about it. But to my core, how we continue to turn a blind eye to it sickens my stomach. And as a white man, I fully acknowledge that I am part of the problem.

So, that’s why I’m writing. To all of you, but particularly my fellow white citizens. In the earnest hope that it sickens your stomach too. To implore you to take up your agency as a city, ignite your volition and form a coalition hell-bent on saying of Minneapolis….. “never again.”

Because that’s what its going to take. And that’s all its going to take.

If you leave it to the justice system and elected officials alone, sadly, your odds of repeating this are inevitable. If you only turn to violence and destruction (from understandably reaching your wits end), your voices will be dismissed, further dishonoring your pain. But if the half-million of you decide that together, you refuse to let it happen again, your intolerance and insistence can ensure that it doesn’t.

Four police officers shredded the lives of countless people through their savage, depraved cruelty. If a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, then you get to decide now that you don’t want those links apart of your chain. But remember, as long as they are, they define all of you.

Please. For the sake of your city. And to set the example for the rest of our nation. All of you – resolve together…never again.

With our best hope for you,

The rest of your 300 million American friends