Image by P C.

After growing up in Mandan, North Dakota—a small town named after the Native Americans violently displaced to form it—moving to Minneapolis for college was the most exciting event of my life.

I fell hard for this place—for its thriving local art and music scenes; for all of its lakes encircled by parklands that keep the mansions that would otherwise privatize them at bay; for its Prince-ly history and the solidarity that stems from slogging through yet another frigid winter together; for its Midwestern common sense sensibility, the Thai food I tried for the first time, and the sense of community that perseveres despite a larger capitalist socio-economic system designed to obliterate it.

Young and naïve, surely, I assumed, this was just the beginning. If I found all this awesomeness in the first in which city I’d ever lived, bigger and better cities would certainly have even more to behold. So, upon graduating with debt and a degree, I moved to New York City in early 2011.

That fall, news began trickling out of an occupation of a small park in the Financial District. Frequently ruminating on how I’d ever pay off my student loans amid an unpaid internship and a nannying gig, Occupy Wall Street’s discourse on income and wealth inequality intrigued me to say the least.

Always a chronicler, I took the subway to Zuccotti Park to see what I could see—and what I saw was people thinking critically and creatively about the neoliberal problems facing us while taking sustained and disruptive action to claw their power back amid the astute observation that no one is coming to save us but ourselves.

Sustained and disruptive action—exactly what’s missing from the nation-wide response to the state-sponsored horror Minneapolis has yet again sustained mere blocks from where George Floyd was slain, the state-sponsored horror that has become this county’s status quo.

To be clear in this post-truth, social media driven world defined by black and white thinking, nothing is all or nothing. It’s not that there aren’t any benefits to scheduled rallies like the ones that have been taking place in Minneapolis and beyond since Good’s murder in broad daylight. When your community is brutalized, coming together is the only way through.

But coming together for a few hours on a weekend afternoon before going back to the regularly scheduled programming of our lives—the ceaseless cycle of working and consuming in which capitalism has incarcerated us by way of having commodified the natural sustenances that are the........

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