A conservative in the chaos of Minnesota

If you live in Minnesota, as I do, don’t turn on your TV. Don’t log on to social media. Don’t turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper or drive under an overpass. We are approaching a zombie apocalypse in Gotham City level of breakdown. And all indications point to more of the same – or worse.

Rioters are rushing to make this the Winter of Despair, modeled after 2020’s BLM Summer of Love. There wasn’t much in terms of consequences for those responsible for Minneapolis’s devastation by fire and looting, so this winter, the activists have reconvened for an epic reunion of riff raff hell-bent on destroying whatever respectability (and infrastructure) remains in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

It starts with a social media video of middle-aged Karen urging her friends to remember that Minnesota is a community that looks out for its neighbors, that fear doesn’t define us and that everyone should be made welcome and feel safe in our state. Kumbaya.

Does that include the illegal criminals, who have been arrested for homicide, rape, and child abuse? If these are my neighbors, I certainly hope they get a personal escort to the nearest federal penitentiary. The feds are here to make us feel safe, Karen.

For a conservative who believes in the concept of rootedness and not abandoning one’s community and extended family (and family business) because of politics, it does present a question of what is best for my family and my family’s future.

The only respite seems to be to take the snowmobile out to the middle of the lake and plant your behind on an overturned bucket for some ice-fishing and solitude in the Great White North.

On Friday evening, I received notice that my church, located just a few blocks from the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where protestors have clashed with federal officials for weeks, cancelled Sunday service because of the encroaching violence. And another church service was interrupted by coordinated protests and celebrity reporter Don Lemon.

The next day, a protester, Alex Pretti, was shot and died in the street in South Minneapolis. Another wave of local and national media, politicians, commentators and pot-stirrers seized on the incident, acting as bellows to the flames as we inch closer to the absolute breakdown of a functioning city.

Being a red-blooded American in a blue state isn’t ideal or easy. But my family has been here for generations. My parents live in the same house I grew up in, which my grandfather built. My own family lives a stone’s throw from it now. But we can’t send our kids to the same public schools my husband and I attended – the school boards have been overtaken by sexual-orientation obsessives and DEI-inclusive policies that emphasize protest and resistance. They abolished bad-behavior expulsions and discipline, and reading and math proficiency have fallen from the top tier to scraping the bottom of the barrel, with more than half of public school students statewide remaining below grade-level proficiency.

In response to ICE activity, Minneapolis Public School is now offering e-learning through (at least) February 12. For a state with failing proficiency rates among public school students, what better way to boost test scores than mimic the disastrous Covid-era at-home learning experiment?

This is the “Nice” tax every Minnesotan is forced to pay in order to be described by Gov. Walz and the Minnesota Karen Brigade as “A place where there’s room for everybody, no matter who you are, or who you love or where you came from. A place where we feed our kids, we take care of our neighbors and we look out for those in the shadows of life.”

Except if you want law and order, high achieving schools, streets emptied of homeless encampments and unhinged rioters, and accountability and oversight over billions of dollars of tax money. How very non-inclusive. Most of us want the quiet, unassuming life that Minnesota used to be known for, with the occasional Wisconsin cheese-head joke thrown in. If you’re for those things, you’re assumed to be a MAGA hat wearing fascist bigot. You’re either on board the progressive express or you’re a nazi.

It’s difficult to convey to people who ask, “Why don’t you just leave?” that this isn’t simple. Our family is here; my kids have cousins and grandparents whom they adore. My dad started his own business here through sweat, tears and financial hardship, turning it into a thriving business where both of my brothers, my parents, and my uncle work. Our chapel, which was forced to close, was where my husband and I were married, where all of my kids and their cousins were baptized, and where my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. How do you say goodbye to that? Is this letting politics beat family? Would we be letting the petty despots chase us out without a fight?

For now, we’ll be staying, enduring the latest chaos that progressive politics and policies have thrown our way and hoping we hit bottom before the state is traded away for Greenland or combusts in a fit of liberal rage. But every time I ask myself, “Why do I stay here?” I think of every family enduring that crazy uncle or nephew for the love, traditions, and community of family and true friends. It’s just that the crazy uncle happens to be our state.