Minnesota (N)ice

Let's start by making something abundantly clear: what is happening in Minnesota is not normal. It is not ok. It is not nice. The current federal "government" is now a lawless rogue state, waging war-like campaigns against its own people while throwing the U.S. Constitution in the shredder. It's a horrifying thing to watch from the other side of the world.

And yet, so many Americans seem oblivious. So many cities in America seem to be allowed to go about business as usual. I saw this when I was in Dallas for the holidays. In a state that has the second largest undocumented immigrant population in the country, I saw zero evidence of an ICE presence. Life there is utterly normal. It's what Jewish-German immigrant Ernst Fraenkel called the "dual state". He lived it in 1930s Germany: a normal, even boring existence for some; a reign of terror for others.

But I'm not here to tell you all the things you've heard and read a thousand times. I want to tell you what it's like to watch this all unfold from thousands of miles away. There are days when I can't think clearly, I'm not at my best. Hell, I'm not even at my mediocre-est. I think about my aunts and uncles there, my cousins. My son. And the knot in my stomach pulls tighter. Fear, rage, helplessness. I want to scream. I want to shake the Democrats who seem to only know how to wring their hands and wag their fingers. I want to yell at the Republicans who could stop this at any time they wanted to, Have you no decency?!

Have you no spine?

Have you no moral compass left at all?

My American friends here in Taiwan haven't bought their plane tickets home for the summer yet. No one knows what state those United States will be in by then. Will it be safe to be there? Will we get stopped at the border? Will there even be flights in and out of our home towns when we need there to be? Would we get stuck in the U.S.? Too many questions and no answers.

And so we wait. We watch the clips on Instagram. Or we avoid them. We read the headlines, or we give ourselves a break from them. Because that is one thing we, as Americans abroad, can do. We can live in relative peace and safety. I was telling my friend a few days ago, who lives in Los Angeles, that I think Americans have largely forgotten what it's like to live in a normal country. They've forgotten what it's like to turn on the news and just see normal things like disagreements over tax rates and building codes. They've become in some ways numb to the hate and division that, let's face it, long preceded the current resident of the White House.

I remember when I first moved to Morocco and I was reminded of what a normal country looked like. I was kind of amazed to see that people didn't hate each other. Politics wasn't a sport there. The people there weren't all peace and love and kumbaya, but they at least didn't see people who disagreed with them as the Enemy or evil. It was how I remembered the U.S. being when I was younger and even into the 1990s.

I could go into all kinds of theories about how and why the U.S. got to where it is today, but that's really not what I want to write about. Plenty of people who better understand the history have written extensively about it. The point is, it wasn't always this way. We used to be more like Morocco. Or Taiwan. Or Spain or France or Sweden or Portugal or any number of countries that I've had the privilege of visiting these past several years whose people have not been brainwashed into believing that anyone who disagrees with them should be wiped off the face of the earth.

And that brings me back to Minnesota. My home. Minnesota is showing the whole world what it means to put differences aside and look out for your neighbor. What it means to be nice. What it means to be united.

That word is still half of the name of our country. I sure hope we can keep it that way.