Betty Firth

Last week I went to Minneapolis for some medical appointments, and my arrival coincided with the migration of most of the visible federal immigration agents out into the suburbs. The street corners were unoccupied. A friend who lives near 33rd and Lyndale in South Minneapolis had lived with the invasion of faceless, dehumanized men, armed as if they were at war, the images we’ve seen daily in the news. They stood guard, ready to snatch people without explanation, emptying the streets of the usual peaceful traffic, filling them instead with fearful tension.
I visited the memorial for Renee Nicole Good, a half-block from where I lived on Portland Ave. for 20 years and talked with the young man acting as guardian and greeter. He provides relief for the people who are standing guard around the clock, saying, “I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit at home and hide.” The snow-covered grass was covered with handwritten notes, flowers, poetry, paintings, candles, teddy bears, and dolls. People stopped by to slowly and silently take it all in, as I did.
The messages ranged from love poems to outrage with promises to never forget, to keep fighting for justice. There were astonishingly beautiful drawings, paintings, and reproduced images of Renee and her wife. One large sign quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “This country will not be a good place for anyone to live unless it is a good place for all of us to live.” I later looked up the quote and found the original version at the website for the Theodore Roosevelt Center: “This country will not permanently be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”
The agents were less visible, but the echoes of their damage remains in the eerily quiet streets, the ICE OUT signs posted everywhere, the graffiti shouting the city’s outrage. My friend and I ate lunch at an Andean restaurant on Lake Street that served food from Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia. “ICE is not welcome here” was posted on the front door, which, along with calls to the police and threats to tow ICE vehicles from the parking lot, had kept them off the premises. The restaurant has managed to stay open, but has lost a lot of business because his usual customers, primarily Spanish-speaking people of color, have been afraid to come out to eat; he said it will take a long time to make up the losses. He was hoping that Governor Walz would be able to negotiate a withdrawal and that peace would return to the city.
I hadn’t been to the Cities in a long time, and I also took the opportunity to indulge in exploring a bit of spirit-lifting art, seeking out a stained glass store in NE Minneapolis that had opened since I was last there. I found it in the Flux Arts building and was delighted to find it also housed studios featuring polymer clay and ceramics, all three long-time hobbies of mine. When I walked into the polymer clay studio, I felt like I’d just walked into Dr. Seuss land or a children’s book illustrated by Gail deMarcken, who manages to fill up every available space on the pages with color. Every wall, shelf, and flat surface was overflowing with color, displaying intricate sculptures and fantastical landscapes. The owner and creator, Layl McDill, was a striking figure, close to six feet tall and dressed in multi-patterned clothing, looking like a character that walked out of The Quiltmaker’s Gift herself. I admired her daring collision and collusion of colors and patterns. She said her mother always gives her a hard time, criticizing her mismatched outfits. We talked for about an hour while I browsed and explored her work, and she prepared for a dozen 12-year-olds coming soon for a class.
Her activist activities within the worlds of art, politics, and community organizing are as full and colorful as her shop. Layl and an artist friend started the Polymer Clay Guild of Minnesota in 2002 because they thought it was time to get polymer clay artists together for support, fun, and creating community projects. She and her husband, Josh Blanc, a potter and co-owner of their business, Clay Squared to Infinity, have provided ideas, energy, and leadership in the thriving arts community in NE Minneapolis, which was just beginning to develop when I moved from Minneapolis to Ely in 1999. Along with 1,000 other NE Minneapolis artists, they participate in Art-A-Whirl, the largest studio tour in the United States. It happens the third weekend in May, in case you’re headed that way. (Neman.org.)
Layl told me about the ICE hell that was visited upon her neighborhood and about the myriad ways people were helping their neighbors, as Minnesotans have all over, providing meals and rides, picking up groceries and medicines, protecting children as they leave school. Layl was walking a dog for an Indian woman who was too terrified to leave her house. She also told me about a project that she’s working on – artists are making thousands of purple hearts to display on NE Central Ave. anytime someone was detained.
I admired what she has done, saying, “It’s brilliant. You have created this delightful space bursting with creativity for you to work and play in…and I have no idea how you get so much done.” She said, “I am really grateful for what I’ve been given to be able to do this, and so I want to share it with as many people as possible.”
She is the personification of the values, passion, creativity, and hard work that has made Minnesota into a “reasonably good place” to live for a diversity of people. She is one example of why Trump’s vengeful bullying and his hired thugs could not stand up to the collective power of Minnesotans.
Contrast that to Marco Rubio’s statement to world leaders at the Annual Munich Security Conference last weekend: William Kristol reported in The Bulwark’s Morning Shots that Rubio did not bother to address actual security challenges to the United States from Russia or China, bur rather “lectured world leaders about the Trump administration’s general view of the nature of politics, war, and patriotism.” He asserted that “armies do not fight for abstractions,” a stunning statement in our 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Lincoln honored Jefferson in 1859, saying he incorporated “an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times…in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” The Secretary of State’s Seal reflects those abstractions. So do the actions of Minnesotans.