letters from Minneapolis

Some letters from Minneapolis:

For the past several weeks, the Twin Cities, and the state of Minnesota overall, has been under siege by federal agents. My friends and coworkers are scared to leave their homes. Every day we see and hear about another innocent person being harassed, detained, and spirited away by plane and kept from their family, friends, pets, and lawyers. Neighbors exercising their constitutional rights are gassed and beaten. Victims emerge from detention centers with horrifying accounts. My friend was on the scene when Renee Good was murdered. In some of the coldest weather of my life, we stood outside for hours screaming for ICE to leave. People are not exaggerating with their comparisons to the gestapo. The streets crawl with them.

And yet I’m at an employer that has kept largely quiet about it. We’re a nonprofit (though not the kind that provides a public service) headquartered in Minneapolis, and after the execution of Alex Pretti the C-suite sent another email that they don’t make position statements unless it has to do with our mission.

My expectations of my org’s leaders were already in the toilet thanks to their previous poor decisions, but my coworkers, passionate people who took lower paying jobs at a nonprofit to do good in the world, are repeatedly infuriated by this. There are constant conversations about “what to do” and “how could they do this”? My personal solution is to not give a fig about this place and put my energy into activities outside of my job, but I won’t tell my coworkers to stop caring.

How am I supposed to work when what little motivation I muster evaporates upon hearing the frustration of my coworkers? How can we take anything seriously for this org at all? I just need to get the bare minimum done so that I don’t find myself needing to stay late to finish whatever task and never think about my job after 4 pm hits. I even dropped out of a job candidacy because I just cannot handle interview prep with this actively happening. This feels so very different from Covid, or even George Floyd, where most people in government at least tried to deescalate things. Now the federal government is actively lying and making calculated decisions to attack us even more, and many of us that are in the midst of it have no idea how many people outside Minnesota truly get what’s going on.

* * * * *

I live in Minnesota. I don’t live inside Minneapolis/St. Paul but grew up there and I have many friends and immediate family there. As you can imagine, life is difficult right now. The news feels constant and unrelenting. I am doing what I can to support my community, but no one knows when the occupation will end and it feels like things are escalating. I worry about my community and my country, I have friends who have been targeted by ICE, and in the midst of this I have to carry on for my young children.

I work for a large multinational corporation. We have a massive office here but I work from home permanently. My boss, my line of leaders, and everyone on my team lives elsewhere. And it feels impossible to work now, which is unfortunate because this is a busy time of year and I have many things to get done. Telling my coworkers that I’m under stress is hard because what is happening has been politicized, so I don’t know how it will be received or how people will respond. And everyone else seems to be going along just fine with their days, discussing projects and deadlines, while I stare at my screen, unable to form sentences.

I have a therapist and I’m not in a mental health crisis, I’m just struggling to work while the world falls down around my community. I know the answer is “take time off’ but how do I explain this to my leaders, who are expecting me to deliver on high-profile projects?

* * * * *

I work in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered here.

My employer has not acknowledged the murders. They have not acknowledged that the office’s collective mental health is in the gutter. There are wind chills of -35F today, with frostbite of exposed skin in 10 minutes or less, but we are still expected to go in to the office in person. We all are. I have been grabbed by ICE multiple times and demanded that I turn over my passport to them, as well as my work ID, trying to get to the office. They don’t care. They’re more afraid of speaking up than of something happening to any of us. We’re just dead weight to them.

I don’t know what to do anymore about any of it.

* * * * *

I work full-time as an admin assistant for three different professionals. There is a central office I work out of that I commute to by bus, but the people I support are elsewhere (one in another city in the same state, two together in the same office out of state). I don’t currently have the ability to work from home. I also live in south Minneapolis, literally blocks from where Alex Pretti was recently killed.

Needless to say, this is affecting me on multiple levels. On a logistical level, I’ve had to request PTO on short notice due to the ongoing volatile situation. On a cognitive and emotional level, I’ve been making mistakes at work due to stress. My job requires consistency, strong communication, and a high level of attention— all of which I have! Normally.

I’m doing my best to keep work and emotions separate, but there’s some inevitable bleed and it’s showing up in ways that make me look careless. I’ve only had this position for six months, and although my three-month review was glowing and the professionals I support have had overwhelmingly positive feedback for me so far, I’m worried I don’t have enough of a track record established for what’s going on right now not to cause problems for me down the line.

How transparent should I be about what’s going on? I’m sure the people I support have a general idea of the situation, and they know I live in Minneapolis, but I’m not sure they’re aware how literally and figuratively close to home all this is for me.

If it was a personal issue, I wouldn’t hesitate to let them know in appropriately vague terms that I was dealing with temporary extenuating circumstances that I am doing my best to mitigate. As it is, though, I work in a somewhat conservative industry and I worry even introducing the topic runs the risk of being inappropriately “political” at work. But also, my city is under armed occupation and my neighbor was just shot in the street in broad daylight, so I am (understandably I think) extremely not okay!

It is okay that you do not feel okay. We just watched our government brutally murder a man in the street.

None of us should feel okay. None of this is okay.

You don’t need to pretend that it is. You are allowed to be human.

It is normal not to be your usual productive self right now. You, like many of the rest of us, are exhausted, distracted, overwhelmed, sickened, and scared.

It is okay to scale back the expectations on yourself and your coworkers to just the minimum right now.

If you need to spell it out for colleagues who aren’t in the area, do: “It’s really rough here right now. We’re right in the middle of everything that’s on the news.” … “People are being accosted on the streets going to and from work, and we’re terrified. No one here is at 100% right now.” … “People are being pulled out of their cars for driving down the wrong street. We’re working in what’s essentially a war zone, so some of this will need some extra time.”

If you do have like-minded colleagues, think about banding together to demand that people in a position to do more — your company’s leadership — do more. There is safety in numbers, and there is power in numbers.

Maybe that means calling out your leadership for staying quiet and expecting business as usual from you and your colleagues and not actively working to keep employees safer. It could mean asking them to do things like:
   • explicitly giving people permission to do what they need to feel safe, including working remotely or delaying travel
   • covering hotel rooms for people who can’t safely go home
   • providing more mental health days and breaks
   • pulling back on expectations while you’re under siege
   • sharing detailed instructions for scenarios involving ICE that might come up at or near work, including contact information for legal help

And it could also mean calling on them to use their influence with higher levels of government to demand that ICE leave your city.

We have more power than they want us to think.

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