Minnesota’s General Strike, and America’s

It may be a precursor

Today in Minneapolis

Friends,

Today, Minnesota is shutting down in solidarity.

It’s the nation’s first general strike in response to Trump’s thuggery.

Across the state, businesses are closed. People are not shopping. Workers have stayed home or called in sick. Labor unions are encouraging work stoppages. Residents are helping one another. It’s an economic blackout.

Organizers are calling it a “Day of Truth and Freedom.”

It could be a model for what the nation as a whole does in coming months, to repudiate the Trump dictatorship.

Ana Marie Cox, writing in yesterday’s TNR, noted that Minnesota is a natural leader for this kind of thing. “It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snow blowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency.”

But what’s happening today across Minnesota isn’t just neighborhood mutual aid; it’s the assertion of grassroots power. Labor federations, the AFL-CIO, and hundreds of businesses are coordinating today’s economic shutdown in direct response to the invasion of Minnesota by Trump’s federal goons.

Cox is right about Minnesota’s culture. “People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, ‘Just pay it back someday.’ Of course you will — everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern micro-distance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.”

Let me add, though, that the culture Cox is highlighting can also be found on the streets and byways of every state in America. It is rooted in a long tradition of people power. It offers one reason why the mobilization in Minneapolis has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder — and why a similar mobilization is taking place around the nation.

It’s the predicate for the ground-level resistance, and widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation and to Trump’s tyranny.

As Cox says, “It’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.”

The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in Lutheran churches seeding what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.

You can find similar seeds in your state and your community.

Cox urges us to look around our own neck of the woods. Our own communities might need us to help seed a little resilience — now, before a crisis arrives to consume us and even if it’s not in a sub-Arctic clime.

This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.

Sign up for the ICE watch that’s happening near you. Because almost certainly, ICE is already there.

Most importantly, know that what Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next.

Minnesota’s general strike should be our template for how we respond nationally.