From Portland: A love letter to Minnesota

It’s been well over a decade since I moved to Portland, Oregon, from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and like most of us from Minnesota who moved away in our youth, I always assumed I would move back home. Life had other plans for me, but my heart remains in the Twin Cities — my hometown, the land of 10,000 lakes and the stolen ancestral homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. 

This is a love letter to my beloveds in Minnesota. To my friends and family, to the community who raised me, the culture that formed me, the organizers who trained me, and to the Twin Cities itself, that glittering gem on the prairie:

Y’all, they picked the wrong people to pick a fight with. And they don’t even know it yet.

After I finished my seminary education but before I moved to Oregon, I worked for five years as a community organizer at a statewide, interfaith, social justice advocacy coalition based in Minneapolis. In this role, I traveled across the state, talking to people of all faiths and parties about the world we wanted to live in.

Minnesotans spoke to me not through lofty ideals or polarized jargon, but of what makes for a good life: food, shelter, work, education and community. Through them, I learned how the common good and common sense are intertwined.

“We all do better when we all do better,” the late, great U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota said before his tragic death in a plane crash in 2002. His words encapsulate that hearty, sturdy, uniquely Minnesotan approach to common life.

When I was in seventh grade, my soccer team won a city championship game and went to the Green Mill in St Paul afterward to celebrate. There, we saw Paul and Sheila Wellstone out for dinner, and they greeted us, shaking each of our hands in congratulations. These were the Minnesota values they exemplified: celebrating each others’ wins, lifting each other up, taking time out of their evening together to congratulate a girls soccer team on their relatively insignificant win. “We all do better when we all do better.” 

Eight years later, as a sophomore in college, I watched with tears of pride as Sen. Wellstone spoke and voted — alongside 22 others, Democrats and Republicans — against the Iraq War on the Senate floor. Two weeks later, his plane fell from the sky near Eveleth, and two months after that, I traveled on a bus to Washington, D.C., with his fingerprints on my heart. “No blood for oil!” I remember chanting as I marched with hundreds of thousands of Americans and our neighbors.

Today, America continues our currency of trading blood for oil, as we steal oil from another sovereign nation and sell it for our own profit. But I learned in Minnesota that we all do better when we all do better — and that truism crosses borders and transcends time.

We do not need to steal other countries’ resources to thrive. We do not need to divest from critical lifelines like SNAP and Medicaid in order to thrive. And we certainly do not need to abduct our neighbors and lock them up God knows where in order to thrive. There are infinite other ways to build a society in which we all can thrive, together.

So today, as I scroll through photos of my hometown fiercely resisting a domestic occupation in the midst of this bleak midwinter, I am not surprised. Because they — and we, with them — are not resisting federal agents just to return to the status quo. They — and we — are not blowing whistles and patrolling our own schoolyards simply for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get out of our communities. They — and we — are not only working to stop the raids and the kidnappings and the shootings and the killings — though yes, that is the first and most urgent goal.

But my hearty, sturdy beloveds in Minnesota — and we, alongside them — are fighting for something so much more than that. We are fighting for a hearty, sturdy, common sense vision of the common good. For food, shelter, work, education, community and dignity, too — for everyone. No exceptions.

May this Minnesota winter be a turning point where we all can name not just what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for.

And may these hearty, sturdy, common sense Minnesotans of all faiths, colors, citizenships and, yes, even political parties, lead the way to a future where we all do better, together.

Rev. Alison Killeen was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is a pastor, community organizer and nonprofit director in Portland, Oregon, and heartily recommends the common sense song about the common good, We All Do Better When We All Do Better by Minneapolis-based musician Jeremy Messersmith.

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