Living in Two Different Cities

I'm sitting in my backyard with the fire pit burning, a dog snuggled up next to me and the quiet sounds of urban wildlife settling down for the night. The sun is slowly setting, we can see it through the little window where our trees open up to the west.

5/30/2020, 9 p.m., Fulton neighborhood, Minneapolis 

A family having a birthday celebration earlier today at Bde Maka Ska.

Three blocks from us, our local shops are boarded up. The grocery store closed at 5 p.m., the liquor store closed last night at 6:30 p.m. and will not re-open until Tuesday. 

The jewelry store down the street is also boarded up and the message "all jewelry has been removed from the premises" spray-painted across the plywood.

Jewelry store at 50th & France.

On one of the businesses at 50th & France.

Our Walgreens, the one where Beauty is so beloved by all the staff members, was broken into two nights ago. One of their doors is covered with plywood. They are open for business because people need their prescriptions, but they, too, closed early.

It feels like the calm before the storm. 

Our family is feeling helpless — we wish we could do more, so we started looking around to see how we could help. Local food shelves are now serving families whose local grocery stores were damaged or are closed anticipating violence. A Minneapolis public school in the 3rd precinct, where all this began, needs help getting food to their low-income families who would normally still be getting free lunch food. So Lindsey and I wrote down the list of what they needed and decided to buy the items, put together the food bags and drop them off tomorrow.

The line at our local Lund's of people waiting to go in to shop was out the door. The grocery store was closing early and still limiting the number of people in the store due to social distancing. So we decided to drive further out, to Bloomington, to shop for these families in need.

The store in Bloomington was also closing at 5; we got there around 3:30 p.m. The lines to check out snaked all the way to the back of the store. It took us two hours to get the groceries needed that we'll donate, as well as the few we needed for ourselves. 

One woman was there to get grocery for her sister, since her sister lives in the area of the protests and can't get to a store. Another was stocking up just in case the store there was a target too and she wouldn't be able to get groceries later on. And then there were people like us, who thought that driving to Bloomington was far enough away for us to avoid a crowd. Silly us.

The line to check out at Cub Foods in Bloomington.

It is so frustrating that just as our businesses were opening back up,after months of being closed due to the pandemic, they are closing again due to civil unrest. Salons that were going to be opening on Monday aren't any more, nor are the restaurants and bars that were set to open June 1. This could send some small business owners over the edge financially. 

All Minneapolis residents are under curfew start at 8 p.m. It is estimated that 10,000 agitators from out-of-state are in our city now, causing chaos and using this unrest as a cover for looting and destroying our city. In today's press conference, Mayor Melvin Carter of St. Paul said that of the 120 arrests that took place in St. Paul last night, 100% of them were from out-of-town. Gov. Walz says that their surveillance is estimating that 80% of the protestors are not from here, many from known white supremist groups. 

I am saddened by what is happening, moreso because we seem to go through this cycle every few years. Brutal murder, followed by outrage, followed by a promise for change, followed by a slipping back to old ways, followed by a brutal murder. And the fact that white supremacists are using this opportunity to besmirch the work of the black community legitimately protesting yet another unjustified death in this country angers me to no end.

I hope for peace. I hope for change. I hope for equality for all and protection under the law.

More later. Thank you for reading.