It's Martin Luther King Day, Which Suddenly Seems Incredibly Relevant

An inescapable network of mutuality.

Protest outside the Whipple Federal Building, Minneapolis Friday. We need a ‘THIS SUCKS’ flag. Screenshot, WCCO on YouTube.

On this Martin Luther King Day holiday, thousands of federal agents are continuing to lay siege to Minneapolis in an operation that’s no longer only about pursuing Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing program (though that’s definitely still aggressively underway). As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pointed out, it has become a “campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota,” because they continue to stand up against the deportation campaign and the fascist invasion of the Twin Cities.

If you want to be terrified for America’s future, look at what Trump’s Homeland security thugs are doing in Minnesota.

But if you want to be inspired for America’s future, look at how ordinary Minnesotans refuse to be terrorized.

Minnesota, right now, is where Americans are bravely, resolutely, and boisterously living out King’s words in “Letter From Birmingham Jail”:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Yes, you’ve heard those words so often they verge on cliché. But let’s spend a few minutes seeing them applied in the Twin Cities. (With a wind chill of -8 degrees F for today’s high, and another “Arctic blast” on the way at that! As this post goes online, the “feels like” wind chill is -28° F)

The most popular personal accessories in the Twin Cities are whistles and cell phones (personal body cams are another option). The owner of Minneapolis bookstore Comma says on Instagram that more people have been dropping by to pick up free whistles than to buy books, and “I couldn’t be happier.”

@commabookshop

Comma, a bookshop (Minneapolis) on Instagram: "We've had more p…

Following a trend that may have begun in Chicago, people are stocking Little Free Libraries with whistles and “Know Your Rights” pamphlets. If that isn’t a beautiful adaptation of an already nice thing into a tool for getting through crisis, I don’t know what is.

In another strategy borrowed from Portland and Chicago, nerds are sharing files to make hundreds of loud 3D-printed whistles for pennies apiece. Mischief, a Minneapolis toy store, is just one of many local small businesses making and distributing whistles, and ICE, predictably, has been trying to claim that whistles won’t deter them from arresting all the child molesters.

@abcnewslive

ABC News Live on Instagram: "A toy store in Minnesota has been …

You know how to whistle, dontcha? You just print out a bit of plastic (or pick one up from someone who’s getting them to people) and blow.

In one of those double-edged Nice Things that are only necessary because of terrible things, the City of Minneapolis wants folks to know that if their car gets towed to an impound lot after ICE grabs them, the city will release the vehicles “to their owners or a representative” at no charge. The implication that the owner may have been disappeared and deported is implicit in “or a representative,” which is fucking terrifying. But for families in a crisis who may depend on that car, the city has at least made clear it won’t add the insult of impound/towing fees to the injury of people being grabbed off the street.

Sometimes the comfort is as cold as the below-zero temperatures in our ongoing national horror.

You want Mutual Aid? How about the folks in the Twin Cities who are picking up and doing laundry for folks who have to stay home and can’t risk going to a laundromat, since ICE is lurking there, too. The People’s Laundry is primarily a mutual aid service to provide laundry help for people in poverty or who are without housing, but it’s expanded its services for people who are in hiding. Here in America in the twenty-first century. People who are in hiding.

As in Portland, some of the protesters outside the federal building that ICE has turned into a detention center have chosen tomfoolery, to mock the violent thugs, because if there’s anything fascists hate, it’s being made ridiculous. And few things can better underline the ridiculousness of these thugs than this Fox News chyron (yes, it’s a screenshot from very real video.)

I don’t think I’ve shared on the site my favorite protest sign from Boise’s No Kings Day; either way, here it is again:

But here’s a disturbing (and entirely predictable) escalation from DHS: They tolerated people in funny costumes making fun of them in Portland. In Minnesota, even dancing furries are being treated as enemies of the state.

Friday morning, DHS sent out a gang of thugs to tackle and rough up a protester dancing in a fox costume in front of the federal building. (Ignore the Bluesky poster’s erroneous caption saying it was the city police department; the goons’ body armor, necessary to protect them from mockery, is clearly marked “DHS”.)

These are dangerous days for whimsy, but protesters will nevertheless persist. “Fuck fascism!” is what the fox says.

Here’s reason for hope: Even some of Trump’s advisers are paying attention to the polls, and are starting to realize that brutalizing Americans is not winning people over.

And just as news of ICE using flash-bangs and tear gas against families with little babies will doom the attempts to stifle dissent, we also will not tolerate Trump turning up the level of violence. After the murder of Renee Good, we know the stakes of standing up to this regime. There will almost certainly be more killings. But it won’t work. Instead, people will keep showing up to chase ICE away, as they have again and again. Just look at how people seemingly materialized out of nowhere to confront the goons in the Minneapolis neighborhood of Lyn Lake last week, just days after Good was shot:

In an interview with WABE’s Rose Scott, Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock discussed the now deadly terror the government is unleashing in Minnesota, pointing out that the prospect of deadly violence didn’t deter the Civil Rights movement either. He noted that Renee Good “could have just stayed at home and minded her own business, but she understood that her neighbors’ business is her business. She literally put her body on the line, which if you think about it, that’s in the best of the civil rights tradition. And she paid the highest cost for it.”

And yes, he quoted the same line from “Birmingham Jail,” because our destinies are inextricably linked to our neighbors’.

Warnock also recounted a story that MLK aide Andrew Young told about a meeting in which King urged Lyndon Johnson to push for the Voting Rights Act. Johnson pointed out that he’d already expended a great deal of political capital on passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and thought it was a bit ungrateful of King to want another landmark bill less than a year later. He told MLK, “I don’t really have the power. You think I have more power than I have.”

King’s aides left the meeting downcast, but King, in Warnock’s telling, just shrugged his shoulders and told them, “Well, I guess if the president doesn’t have the power, we’re going to have to go get him some.” (Young’s version was phrased slightly differently but made the same point.)

That led to more demonstrations, including the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery which was cut short by Alabama state troopers beating marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. Nationwide outrage helped build consensus that it was time for the VRA as well.

Warnock told Scott, “I think that’s the moment we’re in now. We’ve got to remind ourselves that it’s not about the people in power, it’s about the power that’s in the people.”

Goddamn right. We’re at a very dangerous place right now, and instead of LBJ in the White House, we have a far stupider version of Bull Connor. And we have to remember that some things, like justice, democracy, and the rule of law, are worth sacrificing for, because the stakes for all of us are too high to give up.

One more King quote for you, from his 1958 “The Power of Nonviolence.” Just sub in “ethnic cleansing” for “segregation” here:

But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to the tragic militarism. […]

God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization.

We are at a truly terrifying moment in our history. But we have to bring this madness to an end. Find a protest, participate in a boycott, find opportunities to volunteer, and keep up the pressure on your electeds at every level.

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[WABE / The Grio / Letter from Birmingham Jail / TNR]

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