(Missouri is safe from anything like this. We have insurance. We have a Republican Governor.)
But a little soul-searching might be good for us here in safe Missouri. Suppose the ICE goons showed up in St. Louis or Kansas City and started “maintaining order” and cleansing those cities of immigrant populations—a lot of Bosnians in St. Louis and Kansas Cityhas its own Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
The situation in Minneapolis shows no signs of easing, even as to-us intolerable weather conditions prevail. When people are angry enough to take to the streets in these conditions, it is easy to fear the confrontations will become more likely. A Kent State waiting to happen, perhaps. Or perhaps an American Tiananmen Square.
Is Minneapolis going to be America’s Tiananmen Square, a place where courageous people stand up to blunt force authority?
Thirty-seven years ago this June, more than two months of protests took place in Beijing, China. Negotiations between protestors and the Chinese government to reach a peaceful solution broke down, leading the government to send troops to occupy the square. The occupation turned into a massacre that is reported to have taken hundreds of lives.
The next day one man refused to get out of the way of the tanks. Who he was or what happened to him is buried in the secret government files.
Courage can be one man in front of a tank and it can be many citizens in front of an American agency unmatched in modern memory for its recklessness, cruelty, and lack of respect for freedom. From day one it seems to have gone far beyond our President’s announcement that it would seek out only the “worst of the worst.” What is happening among the protestors in Minneapolis is part of the American character. What is happening with ICE in Minneapolis is contrary to every principle of our founders that has guided us, albeit imperfectly at times, for 250 years.
We are likely to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our free country strikingly less free as a whole than at any time in our lifetimes. The thought that we would celebrate this significant anniversary under these continuing circumstances is beyond depressing.
There are only losers in America’s Tiananmen Square in frigid Minnesota today. But this is the United States of America. The people will win.
We turn to the words of the great author, William Faulkner and his Nobel Laureate address in 1950 in which he spoke of the lasting power of the writer, of the poet. I believe what he said, not only about poets, but about the lasting power of a free people.
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures but because he has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
The defiance of the people of Minneapolis should remind all of us of “the courage, and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of (our) past.” I believe the people of Minneapolis, and the people of this nation, will prevail against those who ignore all of those basic values that have sustained us as a nation.