3 miles
ywca track
Still too slippery out on the sidewalk, so back to the y for another track workout. I don’t like running at the track as much as outside, but it’s better than the treadmill in the basement or nothing. Today it was crowded with lots of maneuvering around clueless walkers. I wasn’t angered by it, but it still took energy to speed up and shift and make sure I wasn’t running into anyone. I listened to my moment playlist and tried to stay relaxed. This year, running on the track feels strange — I struggle in the beginning to find my rhythm and my legs are sore when I’m done. But even though it was awkward and not nearly as fun as being by the gorge, it felt so good to be moving and getting my heart rate up.
Before offering so more context for future Sara, here’s a post from a former student that offers a beautiful description of the love here in Minneapolis:
LONG LIVE MINNEAPOLIS…
“…And the restaurateurs refusing ICE service;
The elected officials demanding access to detention facilities;
Long live the mutual aid runners organizing food caravans;
The hospital staff working to keep ICE away from patients and attorneys working to keep ICE out of our courts;
Long live our students pelting ICE with snowballs when they invade school grounds;
The teachers & school admins offering our youth hybrid & e-learning;
The noise makers keeping ICE awake in their hotels all night;
The generous folks handing out samosas, whistles, legal aid, hand warmers, & coffee at rallies;
Long live the immigrant rights orgs, working overtime for weeks to conduct ICE watches, coordinate legal service & comms among separated families, & prevent evictions under occupation;
The Signal coordinators fielding thousands of requests for rapid response alerts;
The artists opening their studios for poster-painting & sharing free downloads & screenprints of their images;
The city council leaders joining the frontlines despite utter exhaustion and risks to their own safety and wellbeing;
The veterans showing up at Whipple to denounce ICE’s abhorrent conduct;
The small business owners speaking out, at risk to their livelihoods;
The journalists upholding truth in the face of massive, state-sanctioned media repression & rubber bullets;
Ordinary folks braving single digit wind chills to lift their voices & march for hours;
Long live every immigrant to Minneapolis, & every child of immigrants.
Despite the truly unfathomable terror and violence unleashed by Trump and his supporters:
There are too many resistors to count. Too many resistors to thank.
We have The Many.”
More context for ICE in Minnesota
In my effort to educate myself about what’s happening in Minneapolis right now, I decided to look for more information about the latest ICE push by the US government here.
(6 January) The Trump administration has launched what officials describe as the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, preparing to deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.
2,000 federal agents sent to Minneapolis area to carry out ‘largest immigration operation ever,’ ICE says
The fraud allegations have been simmering here for at least the last month, becoming very nasty, and getting so bad that it has led to violence against Somali residents:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Minnesota chapter (CAIR-MN) today called on law enforcement authorities and public officials to take concrete actions to protect Somali-American day care centers and businesses that have been targeted with threats and harassment as children return to these centers in the wake of the holiday season ending.
A controversial and largely-debunked social media video of a conservative influencer showing up outside of day care centers in Minnesota has sparked a wave of copycat incidents in which white supremacists and social media influencers show up at similar institutions and demand access to children.
CAIR, CAIR-MN Call for Protection of Somali-American Day Care Centers Facing Copycat Harassment
It has also put so much pressure on Governor Walz that even though he is not directly connected to the fraud claims, he is not running for office again next year. The general sense among many Minnesotans is that the state, and Minneapolis and St. Paul, are being punished because Walz was the vice presidential candidate.
Along with the increased presence of ICE here,
The Trump administration has escalated its campaign against alleged benefits fraud, freezing social services funding for five Democratic-led states and announcing a new fraud-focused position in the Justice Department that will report directly to the White House. Officials also point, without evidence, to immigrants as the primary drivers of the fraud.
Influencer, White House welfare fraud claims are distorted, but the system has risks
added an hour or two later: Just read Heather Cox Richardson’s update on Facebook and this part was particularly pertinent:
Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.
The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.
But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud.
Jane Hirshfield
Revisiting Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful poem, “Interruption: An Assay” that I posted on this day in 2024 and thinking about her definitions of interruption in relation to non-interruption, then disruption, then a break — break as a pause, a momentary stopping / break as a rupture, a split, a gap — a break in the trees, a break in the limestone.
What is the difference between interruption and disruption? Looking to Hirshfield for an answer, or as Mary Oliver puts it, a suggestion, I found a discussion of the periphery vs. the center. Wow!
INTERVIEWER
Your line “less to solve than to speak of what needs solving” reminds me of Chekhov’s statement, “Art does not provide answers, it can only formulate questions correctly.” What does this mean for an artist in our specific moment? One of your earlier poems, “In Praise of Coldness,” begins with another quote from Chekhov, “If you wish to move your reader, you must write more coldly.” It is a beautiful poem. “In sorrow, pretend to be fearless,” you say. “In happiness, tremble.” How do you relate to this statement from Chekhov now, after having written equally beautiful—but not at all cold—poems in Ledger that do, I think, provide answers, despite what you’ve said. I’m thinking of poems such as “Let them Not Say,” for instance, or “On the Fifth Day.”
HIRSHFIELD
Perhaps an answer in the realm of the arts is different from the right or wrong solution we bring to a problem in chemistry or mathematics. Arts “answers,” but in that word’s other sense of response, of reply. Both the poems you’ve named are bells rung hard. They summon attention. When you see a fire, you can’t stay silent.
I, though, do feel in them Chekhov’s coldness. A poem’s meaning requires an engineered, structural soundness, not so different from that of a building or bridge. Language, syntax, verb tense, soundscape, the placing of ink and ink’s absence on a page, are material things, just as steel is. Words experienced as comprehensible, consequential, do follow rules, though they are rules that a writer, like an architect, can test, press toward their outer limits. New materials bring new shapes of meaning and feeling. Those two poems feel strongly, but they are not an uncontrolled weeping. They argue, in the old-fashioned, rhetorical sense of that word, for something that matters, and make their argument in the ways art mostly does—from the side. I think it’s a good thing that poets work far from the center of our celebrity- and economics-driven culture. From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial. A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart’s walls’ mortar.
A Poem is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield / The Paris Review
From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial.
A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart ‘s walls’ mortar. Yes! Hirshfield has another poem, In Praise of Being Peripheral, that I am reminded of here. Now I want to give more attention the peripheral, but later.
