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Showing posts from June, 2020

A Letter From Saint Paul

As I write this we are about a half an hour from curfew. I’m in St. Paul. It has been hit far less than its counterpart across the river but my neighborhood, the city’s poorest and most diverse, is still boarded up. My neighbor is a mental health professional and helped out at a makeshift hospital for the protests. I mowed her lawn the other day and found a clear attempt to start a fire in the alley. It looks like they tried to set another neighbor’s garage on fire.  Things have been much calmer the last few nights. After George Floyd was murdered I felt sick to my stomach. (And I’m a white guy. I don’t pretend to know how people who have been attacked by those brutes for generations feel.) My view is that the first two nights were what you could call a rebellion, the pinnacle being the burning down of the third precinct . (The city was reduced to abandoning it and pretending there was a gas leak .)  Night three saw a qualitative change. It was lumpenized to the point o...