GUEST COLUMN: I’m So Outraged by What the Administration Has Done in Minnesota That I Won’t Forget About It for Three Weeks

Then, back to normal

Stock photo by Richard Drury via Getty.

I’m not a very political person. I don’t watch cable news, and my social media feed is mostly crafting ideas and dog grooming tips. I vote, but I’m no partisan diehard — you’re not going to find me at a political protest or knocking on doors for a candidate.

But events in Minnesota go beyond politics and offend my sense of decency. It’s not just that two tragic and seemingly unjustified shootings have happened in a short period of time: The administration’s efforts to slander the victims and stifle investigations point to a deeper rot. What kind of a government responds to the killing of its own citizens with belligerence and obvious lies? What kind of a president steamrolls the rights of his political enemies while promoting impunity for his friends? I’m starting to see why my sister keeps posting “THIS IS NOT NORMAL” on Facebook.

Typically, hot-button political stories fade from my memory almost immediately. But this time feels different. I won’t soon forget the horrible videos, nor the administration’s insulting attempts to spin things in their favor. No, it will take at least three weeks — and maybe up to a month — for me to forget about this entirely.

The video of Alex Pretti’s death is seared into my brain, and I do mean “seared”, which is to say: It has made an imprint on the surface. It will linger for a while, though it’s hard to imagine it still being there by, say, March. Especially with the Olympics in the middle — if something memorable happens in women’s figure skating, that will erase the evidence of creeping authoritarianism ahead of schedule. Three weeks is just a best guess — it could be more, it could be less. Though I wouldn’t bet on “more”, especially with my daughter’s winter dance recital coming up.

It’s an iron-clad lock that this entire sequence of events will be nowhere in my consciousness when it’s time to vote in November. If you say the name “Alex Pretti” to me then, I’ll probably think “He’s a judge on Top Chef, right?” The day I go to vote, I’ll surely be focused on other issues, like the price of hamburger meat or kids riding loud dirt bikes in my neighborhood. It’s hard to know what I’ll be focused on! The only thing we know for sure is that I won’t be thinking about Alex Pretti or…what was the lady’s name? Rene Russo? That one’s almost gone already.

If I do have any faint, borderline-subliminal recollections of these events, they’re certain to be wildly distorted. I’ll probably think that the shootings were done by regular police, and that the victims were Black, and that they happened under Biden. I might even recall Tim Walz pulling the trigger in a scenario that’s actually the “Do you feel lucky?” scene from Dirty Harry. Really the only scenario we can safely rule out is my current thoughts and feelings leading me to cast a vote that results in any consequences whatsoever for the people responsible.

This is January 6 all over again. God, January 6 — I haven’t thought about that in years! When was that, 2015 or 16? And did we ever figure out who did it — was it ISIS? Speaking of which: What’s ISIS up to these days? These things are real blasts from the past. Watch this: GANGNUM STYLE — when was the last time you thought of THAT??? Here today, gone tomorrow — that’s how the human mind works! But in this case, the overreach is so egregious, and the administration’s ham-fisted attempts to rationalize thuggery are so outrageous, that my memory of events won’t be gone tomorrow.

But…Valentine’s Day? Yeah, I probably will have forgotten all about this by then.

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