The Day After an Execution

There are a couple of things that I hope will stick with me from yesterday's killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

In the second video circulating, the one that has more lead-up and better shows what ends up happening, the person filming is not surprised that Border Patrol goons attacked Pretti and forced him to the ground. That they started hitting him as he lay face down. The person filming just kept filming. 

That tells you that people in Minneapolis are now accustomed to scenes like that. It is normal. You maybe yell at the goons, and blow your whistle. But you know it won't do any interventional good. The only thing you can do is record it. 

But as soon as the gun(s) go off, the person recording reacts with some kind of exclamation and runs away, because someone being shot is still not normalized. 

How many more shootings will it take before our government killing us becomes something that is normal?

There was, as you might expect, much discussion and good analysis yesterday on BlueSky. People processing trauma. Sharing videos of people being interviewed on the scene at Nicollet Avenue (a few blocks from places I lived in my early years here in Minnesota). 

We all have different things that affect us. The one thing that I saw that really made me tear up was a short post by Bob Collins (@mylittlebloggie.bsky.social), who retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019. He was a news editor there for quite a while, but also was on-air, and created several blogs. Highly regarded during his career. Not a flame-thrower, by any means.

He wrote this:

We are outgunned. We are not outnumbered.

Reading it again now, it still gets me.

The last thing I think I'll remember is from the candlelight vigil we had in my neighborhood last night. It started at 7:00 p.m., coordinated with similar vigils all over the cities. About a hundred people came to the corner I organized. Lots of candles, and at first people were just kind of milling around, talking quietly. Then a couple of women near me said something about singing, and we figured out a song. They both had nice soprano voices and started off with a simple song that I didn't know, but could follow an octave below them. 

We went on from there, and of course the crowd joined in. We sang many of the usual songs, but the list also included "Lean on Me," which I would not have thought of. Then the minister of the adjacent Lutheran church led us in a song from the Poor People's Campaign called "Everybody's Got a Right to Live," as well as "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

After an hour or so, it was pretty cold and people trickled away. Some of the candles, in their glass votive holders, were left in the snow along the sidewalk. 

I was the last one to leave. As I was warming up my (electric) car, a person came walking past and stopped by the still-lit candles. He stood there at least until I drove away.