MINNESOTA STRONG - by Peter d’Entremont

This is year 250 for the USA. In 1976, year 200, there was a year- long celebration and it was joyful and hopeful. Watergate and the Nixon scourge was behind us and the Vietnam War was, thankfully, undergoing a time of healing, however hit or miss that was. The current President, Gerald Ford, was a decent man, if not exactly exemplary and effective. Stagflation was building and it would help take down the next President, an eminently decent man himself. The world still had nuclear annihilation hanging over us but it seemed, to me at least, that the future was less dire.

Ten years before I had started school in Minnesota, eventually graduating from the University of Minnesota and lived in Minneapolis for three years. It was a small city then and was about to burst out of its fairly insular shell to become a much larger and significant city, with taller buildings, the Mall of America. I lived off campus in a shared apartment in a residential neighborhood within walking distance of the city center. My walk to campus took me through the city’s Native American neighborhood along a not so prosperous commercial strip. Several blocks away was Lake street, the scene of many recent confrontations, including George Floyd’s murder and ICE battles. And in between where I lived and Lake street was one of the Black American neighborhoods, where I spent part of a year volunteering at a community center. My graduation thesis was a redevelopment proposal for an Italian American neighborhood in St Paul. I’m Canadian American

for that matter. Note the pattern.

My college roommate was fixing up an old house in St Paul and we came back to the Twin Cities, with our young daughter, in the Summer of 1976, spending a month or so working on the house and getting it closed in with a new roof. As I said, it was a hopeful time, time to raise a family and restore a century old house. As noted, Minneapolis, St Paul too, have grown. In addition to Native and Black Americans there are Hmong, Somali, Vietnamese descendants too. They are part of the Twin Cities growth too.

Year 250 is beginning ominously, nothing like 1976. The Twin Cities are under siege by our own government. That’s a hard sentence to write without wincing and gritting teeth. I enjoyed my years in Minnesota and continue to feel a deep connection to the state and the Twin Cities in particular. It’s extremely painful to hear and see what the people there are enduring. I am proud of the way they have reacted, reacted like decent people everywhere would and should react; react like true Americans. I hope that the rest of the country takes notice and is inspired by their decency and courage.