A Carl in Minneapolis considers the lessons of Operation Metro Surge
I actually got my Carleton kid on the phone. He’d like to be left alone to do the things Carleton kids do—meet for late-night potlucks, walk in the Arb and look at the moon, study, study, study. But, he called!
“Did you get tear-gassed?” he asked.
Saturday morning, a murder in our neighborhood, near the banh mi shop where, starting in seventh grade, my son would rescue a night gone sideways with sandwiches for dinner. I went, it took two minutes. A crowd chanting—Shame, shame, shame!—standing politely behind a string of yellow police tape, so politely that when the ICE agents moved the tape, the crowd complied, stepping neatly back. Suddenly, without a word, without any warning, ICE launched tear gas in every direction—instant Apocalypse Now. Clouds of poison gas blotting out the sky, the rat-a-tat-tat of pepper ball fire, the flash and bang of flash bangs. I ran, coughing. The cloud of tear gas blew home with me, and came inside. I could smell it all day.
“You heard about that?” I wasn’t planning to tell him.
“I know you’re all going through it up there,” he said. “I want to hear about it.”
I spilled the beans. I was okay. “But I want to hear about you. That’s what makes my heart feel good.”
“Okay,” he allowed. “I’m registering for classes. I have to take a lab to graduate, so I’m thinking about getting that done spring term.”
I cannot tell you how happy that made me, in that moment.
A “lab,” of course, is a science class during which students in a laboratory record data, and, at the end of it, the facts you find in the laboratory determine your conclusions. A lab is a key part of a liberal arts education, and this is what I wish for every human, the opportunity to believe in and participate in our enlightenment project of seeking truth while utilizing reason.
Monday morning, I walked out my door in the thin light of an early Monday morning, mom-style, coffee in one hand, to take my high-school daughter to her bus. Three doors down, on the stoop of the house where the daffodils come up first thing every spring, three men bristling with AR-style guns, barrels poking up in every direction, three more on the sidewalk. It looked like occupied Belfast in the 1990s. I grabbed my whistle and blew, and blew, and blew. The bristling, masked men left in two SUVs, trailed by a beat-up four-door car with two twenty-something women in medical masks, the bravest young women. My daughter came flopping down the steps, putting on her jewelry.
“What happened?”
Great question. If we recorded it in a lab notebook, what? I saw: Soldiers. Guns. In a place I don’t usually see them.
What conclusion does that data indicate? That’s harder to say.
Was ICE legally enforcing laws? Was ICE just looking for brown people to beat up, like they did to the 17-year-old Target worker in nearby Richfield who was howling “I’m a citizen” before being roughed up, driven off, and dumped, bleeding, in a Walmart parking lot miles away?
On Tuesday morning, in the dark of the smallest hours, I heard other neighbors whistling to warn of ICE, but by the time I got out of my bed and to the window they were gone. On Thursday morning, I had my coffee in one hand and was looking at my phone when I found a dozen people right in front of my very front door: An ICE agent was parked in a Jeep Wagoneer, glaring at the yellow school-bus stop, looking for children.
When I shared my stories from Operation Metro Surge online, they went viral, and I paid the viral tax, spending hours deleting comments along the lines of Megyn Kelly’s viral comment: “Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations. It’s very simple.”
It’s not simple at all. Twice in a week, I walked out my front door trying to get my kid to school and ended up in the middle of ICE operations. The day Renee Good was killed, I was a couple blocks away an hour before, because she was murdered on one of the south side’s most traveled roads, and I traveled it to get my kid to school. Avoiding ICE in Minneapolis during Metro Surge was nothing like simple.
However, “It’s very simple” is an interesting statement.
For my own Carleton art history comps I was fascinated, like many 1990s kids, with the idea of the gap between the signifier and signified, particularly as it related to certain artists and architects. If Cindy Sherman made a photo that looked like a 1950s film noir damsel in distress, but it was actually a photo of herself, an artist with agency who was not in distress but in control, questioning the notion of omnipresent images of women’s distress—what even is that? If a marble column meant one thing when carved 2,500 years ago in a temple to Aphrodite, and then meant another thing in the 1800s when it was used to attach the then-new United States to the Greek and Roman classical traditions, what did it mean in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, propagandist of Hitler and “Nazi Neoclassicism”? I tell anyone who will listen that the only thing that has prepared me for this moment was my training in liberal arts, and thinking about data on the one hand, and those gaps on the other: When you hear the words “law and order” but you see something different. When you hear the phrase “It’s very simple” but you see nothing simple at all.
When I got to Carleton, via one of America’s most elite high schools, New York City’s Stuyvesant, I came in profoundly under-educated, in so many ways. It’s probably like that for most Carleton kids, but what’s different about me is that I never found it embarrassing: Any 18-year-old just knows what the world around them has let them know. When I got to my freshman writing seminar I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and got to the part where Native Americans are given smallpox-infested blankets. I shut the book and said—nope! This definitely never happened or I would have heard about it by now. But: I learned. I learned the horrible truth. In the process, I also learned how power and education create memory. In a history class we read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and I began to internalize various truths I now hold as self-evident, like: Memory is a group project. And: Truth is a thing you fight your way towards, data point by data point, like you write down in a laboratory, but very often wrapped up in gaps, history, and different bits of memory which require interpretation and reason.
The morning I write this, announcements have been made that ICE will withdraw. I use that mealy-mouthed passive voice on purpose: Announcements have been made, but are these truthful forecasts of our immediate future? They weren’t last time.
As my neighbors mourn Renee Good and Alex Pretti, everyone keeps referring to Thomas Jefferson’s letter advising that from time to time, the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots. It’s a tough sentiment for me to take on board. Must? This much pain, this much devastation, particularly for the Good and Pretti families—must?
We are, all of us, going to come out the other side of this ICE occupation of the Twin Cities profoundly changed. Some of us will be inspired by community and courage. Others are in detention, financially devastated, mourning, or finding their families shattered and scattered. There will be smaller, less profound second and third order effects, too.
One odd little effect is that I’ve suddenly noticed that the people most equipped to handle this outrageously complex situation have been the people who went through the steps of a liberal arts education, like writing down facts in a lab, reading and deeply considering 1984, The Great War and Modern Memory, and Ceremony, and then pushing themselves till their minds flex and strain under the rigor of comps. It isn’t often remarked upon, but, clearly, the tree of liberty also must be refreshed, year after year, by a new class of teenagers learning to wrestle truth from the same eternal questions.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl ’92, P ’28 is a senior writer at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and the author of The Essential Dear Dara.