Minnesota Nice - Joy IS Resistance (full chapter)
“We need micro joys. Micro joys get us through the macro grief.”
What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.
If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.
“We need micro joys. Micro joys get us through the macro grief.”
~Kelly Wilson, founder of the Do’Gooders, a Minnesota Mutual Aid effort
“Would you like to hear a G-rated joke?”
In the produce section at Trader Joe’s an elderly man who looked to be well into his eighties holds a pile of leaflets and a peculiar sparkle in his eye.
Target was always the go-to everything store in Minnesota. Especially when SuperTargets came to be and groceries were brought into the department store.
But Target had betrayed us, allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots and use their restrooms. Target no longer felt safe, especially since we’d seen and shared the viral videos of high school kids working as cart-retrievers being abducted from their jobs at Target while insisting they were U.S. citizens.
So, we started shopping at Trader Joe’s instead. The more claustrophobic parking lots at TJ’s were too cramped for a caravan of unmarked SUVs.
When we adjusted our vision from bullseyes to hibiscus flowers, we found ourselves greeted by a community atmosphere that included a jokester giving a warmer welcome than we knew how to handle.
“Sure,” we say, hesitantly. We want to be polite, but we also want to be left alone, a perfect example of Minnesota Nice.
Long winters have trained us into staying humble and not making a scene, because a scene requires heat and energy and effort, all things in short supply in the deep cold of winter. So we endure, and keep things in, and swallow reactions, soften edges, and use polite phrasing.
In Target, we could move through an entire errand and through the self-checkout without anyone making eye contact. That was the deal, and we were fine with it. But in Trader Joe’s during Operation Metro Surge, this little old man somehow enters our protected inner-shopping-world without violating it.
“You can take this one home to the toddlers in your family. They’ll love it!” he says with the eagerness of a preschooler racing toward his own punchline.
We add a polite nod, which outsiders might construe as passive-aggressive. But, the truth is that the Minnesota Nice Golden Rule — if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all — is so deeply coded into our bone marrow that we don’t know how to relate any other way.
“Why did the boy take a job at the bakery?” he asks.
“Why?” we say with a smile, relaxing a bit into the moment.
“Because he kneaded the dough.”
He belly-laughs at himself and his punchline, and then introduces himself as a former preschool teacher and a current Sunday School teacher.
We exhale a soft sigh. He really is harmless, and so we accept his leaflet filled with a couple dozen more G-rated jokes and thank him kindly.
“You betcha,” he says in that perfect Minnesota-Scandinavian accent.
After filling our cart with non-name-brand things while uttering a half dozen “well, that’s different” under our breath, we get into the checkout line. Instead of pulling out our phones, we pull out his list and start reading, because he might notice and we want to make him feel good.
On the front: G-rated food jokes.
On the back: ways to save democracy and the Constitution, complete with progressive news sources, action steps, and phone numbers for elected officials.
“That guy has been here for hours,” the checkout clerk says. “I’ve been laughing at his silly jokes all day long. Best day ever!”
Our Minnesota Nice makes us come off to outsiders as a people too polite to push back, too pleasant to be dangerous. ICE didn’t realize the stubbornness that lives inside that kind of self-restraint. We are most certainly not a people to submit to an unreasonable demand.
ICE made the mistake of invading a winter people in the winter.
