Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings
Friday gratefuls: Shadow, the awake. Cold night. Snow. Morning darkness. Light-headedness. Mussar. Altitude. Distracted. A bit dizzy. Working my scheduled review of newspapers, websites, podcasts. Doing further research on Pan. On the luparii. Reimagining Superior Wolf. Minnesota. Proud to have lived there forty years. Colorado. Proud to have lived here eleven years.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Minnesota
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress
Year Kavannah: Creativity. Yetziratiut. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso
Week Kavannah: Patience. Savlanut. “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tarot: Back at it soon
One brief shining: Rene the Good died at the hands of an ICE firearms trainer after another ICE agent had threatened her by trying to open the door of her Honda Pilot and shouting in her rolled down window, “Get the fuck out of the car.” As she turned her vehicle away to leave, she received a bullet to the head.
Don’t cry for me, Minnesota. The truth is I never left you. How I felt when I saw the familiar setting in Powderhorn Park. That maroon SUV parked diagonally on Portland. The so-out-of-place government provocateurs with masks-masks!-hiding their identities. ICE. A Trump militia spreading fear and chaos in American cities.
In Minneapolis. Wrong place to kill an unarmed woman. Minnesotans. Will. Not. Stand. For. This. The Federal government, Kash Patel’s oh so trustworthy FBI, took over the investigation. Minnesota’s criminal justice system would have arrested and charged the ICE agent with first degree murder. No wonder the FBI stepped in.
I would rather have local authorities investigating. Especially the state attorney general’s office. Though. Based on video and eye-witness testimony I don’t see any wiggle room. While Renee had disregarded an order, she turned her SUV away from the agents to drive from the scene. That’s clear from the video examinations done by the New York Times. There was nothing in her movements that warranted gun fire.
My heart leapt back into Minnesota on seeing this news. Became one again with the street level politics I knew so well there. Powderhorn Park has an active political community, many leftists, anarchists, co-op folks.
The glaring, searing contrast between masked agents of fear and the community oriented spirit of Powderhorn Park struck me forcefully, enough to make me gasp.
I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling. Minnesota and its politics of the common good has been my North Star. Flawed, sure. Full of humans. But there I found the arc of the moral universe bent a little further toward justice than most places I knew. Minnesota shaped me into the man I am now and I like who I am now.
This brutal, senseless killing shows the moral sinkhole that hate and bigotry have created in our national spirit. This is not how Americans are. Is it?
A shining city on the hill. A beacon to other nations. No longer. We will, if we have not already, become a pariah state, only engaged in actions in our perceived self-interest. Not my America.