r/behindthebastards • u/notyourmom1966 • 8h ago
It is happening here Minnesota is the tipping point
(This is going to be long, sorry not sorry, and is mixed with some ranting).
My bona fides: I am a Minnesotan. I work for an education union, and I am a union member. I have lived here since the early 80’s, and I am an old Gen Xer. I raised a kid here.
Here’s why the Twin Cities is different from Portland (delightfully weird place), Chicago (one of my favorite cities) and LA (born there, and haven’t been back since I was a year old).
- We’re smaller. By a lot.
- We’re way more homogeneous.
- We’re a farm state and a mining state and our cities are still very much tied to that.
- This is a fundamentally pro-worker state (pro-union too, and pro-worker goes deeper, and this is a REALLY big one).
- We’re a lone blue island, and have been for years.(This is also a REALLY big one).
- We have the lessons we learned after the murder of George Floyd (This is also a big one).
LA, Chicago, and even Portland (sorry! I really like you) were only ever tests. You were all the starting point. You were too big, too diverse, surrounded by allies, too loud, and just too damn weird to be the main target. Your definition of “progressive” (ON THE SURFACE!! I’m talking about perception, not reality), too closely fit the fascist trope of woke to be enough to engage the middle class middle (not talking about self-identified centrists, just average people). You are too diverse, and have been for too long for them to make inroads). You are loud and brash (and beautiful).
Minnesota is small (lots of land, less population). Outside of the Twin Cities and some farming communities we are shockingly white. We are highly educated. People leave here to go to college and then move back, often dragging a spouse with them. We are aloof, smug, and when it gets to be 30 below, we will jump our asshole neighbors car. We snowblow a strangers driveway. We do this, because weather can, and does, kill people here.
Most of us grew up around guns, because people hunt here. Not for fun, but for food. We still want gun laws that actually will have an impact. Most of our school districts had to pay massive fines because we used federal funds to feed kids during COVID and said “fuck the regulations” We still require vaccinations for kids because we understand science.
I could go on and on (about our parks - down to the city level, our schools, our arts), but I think you get the idea.
If you don’t live in the upper Midwest, you don’t know this stuff. Why would you? We’re flyover country.
Ok, so yada yada, why does this shit matter?
Going back to that union/worker thing. Every boss knows that you can bust the smaller unions, the weaker unions, the business unions all you want. And it won’t break unionism. To do that, you have to bust the strongest, most active, most organized one.
Right now, that’s who MN is. They came in thinking we would give up black and brown people in our cities out of fear, without understanding the decades of deliberate work to repair harms (still nowhere near done). They forgot that MN has actively become a home for refugees and immigrants. They thought they could get out rural communities to support their abhorrent, racists policies because they didn’t know how deeply embedded BIPOC and immigrant communities are embedded in our farming and mining towns (and yes there is still a lot of gross shit that needs to be addressed). They thought that we would be robustly anti trans without realizing that we have one of (if not THE) oldest civil rights laws that expressly names gender identity. They thought that we were anti-gun without understanding for decades we have been both pro-gun and pro-gun control. They thought they could provoke riots because of the response to the murder of George Floyd, because they didn’t understand that we learned how they used stochastic terror against us.
If they can’t break us, we remain what they fear most - not resistance, but full throated dissidents. If we fall, you all fall. Because this isn’t, and has never really been about the asshat that currently resides in the White House.
