How Democrats failed Minneapolis

What happens after an unspeakable tragedy? One that comes on an idyllic late August day in Minneapolis that signaled the end of a barefoot summer and the beginning of back-to-school activities, reacquainting with friends, and easing back into a school schedule? For two families, it is the end of any normal life they had known. For countless other families whose children attended Annunciation Catholic School in a peaceful, leafy-treed neighborhood of the city, it marks a new life of contradiction: of being blessed that they are reunited with their loved ones and overwhelming grief at an inhuman, violent targeting of innocent life at its most sacred – within the walls of a church while at prayer.

It’s been difficult seeing the place where you were born, raised and now have a family of your own appear in the news time and again because of terrible events. I live a stone’s throw from the home I grew up in – where my parents still live, close to the high school from which my husband and I graduated, near the ball fields and ice-cream shops, and the little library that still retains its distinct 1970 aura I take my kids to now. But despite halcyon thinking that a place can maintain its natural cohesiveness and unchanging innocence, events like the horror at Annunciation jar you into reality.

The reality is that over the course of a few decades, the state has decided to pick sides, playing favorites in a game of politics, public policy and, now, life itself.

You see, somewhere along the way to actual governance in a judicious, fair-minded, and properly normal, rational process, Minnesota’s ruling hammer – the Twin Cities – decided it is more important to honor the empathetic feelings of a certain white, progressive, eminent class over the basic standards of law and order, equality and sanity.

With the slimmest of legislative margins (34-33 after the 2022 elections), a blowhard governor and a feckless opposition party, the Democrats passed a series of radical policies that stifled any semblance of normalcy – from legalizing abortion up to birth, to being a “Trans refuge” state (with full support from Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan), and allowing illegal aliens in the state to acquire a driver’s license.

When you’re a hammer, everything that doesn’t go along with your radical agenda is a nail – including safety for school kids not attending one of the state’s failing public schools. And now we’re seeing the tragic consequences. A 2023 letter to the Walz administration, signed by Tim Benz of MINNDEPENDENT and Jason Adkins of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, pleading for funding expansion to nonpublic schools for safety measures went unanswered, even in the midst of a nearly $18 billion state budget surplus. This despite his campaigning on a “One Minnesota” message and making the state, “The best state in the nation for kids to grow up in. Today, we’re turning that vision into reality.” What Walz envisioned is now a nightmare for the families of Annunciation, especially those of the eight- and 10-year-old children who a transgender-identifying individual murdered.

The failure becomes painfully clear when Minneapolis’ Mayor Jacob Frey admonishes those who bear the weight of the sufferers by praying. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying,” Frey said. The one thing that someone feeling helpless in a hopeless situation can take on is an appeal to love over fear and good over evil.

Frey used his appearance on CNN to double down from an earlier press conference to make sure the murderer’s “identity” wasn’t a target of attack. “Anybody that is going to use this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any community, has lost touch with a common humanity…We need to be standing up for every community, our Catholic community too, by the way.” Frey told interviewer Erin Burnett. It’s so generous of the mayor to think of the victims as an afterthought while minimizing the pattern of destructive violence from the person who has special protection in the state according to his identity.

As a lifelong Minnesotan and one who has passed over career opportunities, better cost-of-living standards and certainly better weather to stay in a state where my family is rooted, it is difficult to bear these constant struggles with tragedy being excused by civic leaders who have no interest in making this place – especially the Twin Cities – a home for families who don’t want to be scolded for their religious practices, politics or way of life. We can no longer afford to believe our government will afford the same protection for us as it does for its political agenda. This is the reality of Minneapolis and the wider metro area, much as it is in many blue cities across the nation: it is up to us to keep alive the ideals of the past in a radically progressive era. Know your neighbors, keep your children close, and do not rely on the promises or rhetoric of politicians who unabashedly choose winners and losers based on political or ideological dogma. Listen to what they say; they’ve been telling us all along who they really are. Life is too precious to ignore them.