Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future |
How Minnesota Beat Trump
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Minneapolis
The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist. It’s not just that I’ve had to watch the Trump administration destroy cherished alliances, like ours with Western Europe and Canada, that have upheld freedom, democracy and global trade since World War II. It’s also been the stunning cowardice and boundless greed with which leaders of big law firms and Big Tech have bent their knees to King Donald and indulged a cabinet of clowns — not one of whom they’d hire in their own businesses.
But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.
It was one of the most courageous battles ever fought by American men and women not in uniform. It was led by moms ready to donate their breast milk to strangers and dads ready to drive someone else’s kids to school because the parents, terrified of ICE agents, were too afraid to go out outdoors. It was neighbors ready to hit A.T.M.s to help out neighborhood restaurants and businesses deciding not to open — thus forgoing their income — for fear that masked ICE agents might drag away their cooks or dishwashers or desk clerks.
And the best part was this: At a time when we have a president so shameless that he insists on putting his name on every public building he can, these good Samaritans of all colors and creeds acted without fanfare. “There were hundreds of leaders of this movement,” Bill George, a longtime Twin Cities business executive, said to me, “and I don’t know a single one of their names.”
Many surely got to know one another, though, because they were all propelled by a verb I’d never heard before: “neighboring,” as in, Today I will be neighboring — going out to protect the good people next door or down the block. Not because I favor illegal immigration, but because I oppose the fundamental indecency of President Trump and Stephen Miller and the blessedly now departed Kristi Noem trying to fulfill their daily quota for evicting illegal immigrants by arresting my neighbors, most of whom work hard, pay taxes, go to church or mosque and help me dig out my car from the snow in winter.
Here’s some free advice for Trump and Miller: Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighborliness — not everywhere, not always, but in a lot of places on a lot of days. Its power is rooted in its ordinariness — just a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbors and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook