A Letter to My Trump-Supporting Neighbors

Our fates are bound up with one another. We cannot change that.

There are many reasons I’m restrained about when — and how — I speak about national issues.

As an organizer and private citizen, I speak out routinely, but as an elected official, I’m more deliberate. I was elected to represent everyone, not just people who agree with me or people who vote the way I do nationally. At the local level, my job is to bring stability, common sense, and care to local government; to be a steward of public trust and public finances; to show up, do the work, and deliver tangible good to help make everyday life a little more secure. Good things don’t always make the news, but I believe deeply that elected officials should be judged by what they do, not the words they post and repost on social media. I refuse to be a pundit. I refuse to be baited into finger-wagging, scolding, or adding noise to an already deafening environment of division. Whenever possible, it’s also my job to contribute to healing. Small towns prohibit the luxury of vilification, of the ‘other’. We can’t do very much at all here without coming together; it just doesn’t work.

But there are moments when the foundations of public life are so violently and vividly ruptured. These are moments when restraint is not responsible, and would harm, not heal. Silence becomes abdication.

The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis is one of those moments. The killing of Alex Pretti is another.

Video from the scene over the weekend shows a man acting as a legal observer —someone whose role is to document, not interfere — being wrestled to the ground by ICE agents after trying to help a woman to her feet. He is violently beaten. He is disarmed of a weapon he was legally allowed to carry. And, after he is disarmed, no longer posing a threat, he is shot and killed in the street.

We must allow investigations to proceed. We must respect process. But we also cannot deny what our eyes see. “Distressing” or “disturbing” does not even begin to describe this. Something has gone profoundly wrong when someone is killed under these circumstances by agents of the state who are being encouraged to continue down this path.

I am writing to those of you who supported me locally and supported this administration nationally. I know many of you, well and personally, and there are many of you whom I don’t know. But I live among you. If my 24 years in this community have taught me anything, it’s that we are far more alike than our politics suggest.

You care about living a good life. You care about providing for your family. You care about safety, fairness, and being able to look at yourself in the mirror with a clean conscience. You care — whether you’d phrase it this way or not — about the condition of your soul, and the kind of country your children will inherit.

Ask yourself honestly: does this make us safer?

Does this feel right?

Does a government that would empower people who answered a call to ‘defend the homeland’ and receive a $50,000 sign-on bonus, who, in many cases, have little to no law enforcement background whatsoever; provide them with enormous discretion, the authority to inflict lethal force, and a legal shield to sidestep fundamental rights; and put them on the streets of America with a quota, leaving untold chaos in their wake — does that government really care about you, me, or any of us?

I am not accusing. I am not sneering. I am pleading.

At some point, each of us has to reckon with whether the decisions we make are producing the world we hope for. Whether it is making our communities more stable or more fearful. Whether it is helping us pursue a good life — or hardening us, slowly, against things we once would have said were clearly wrong. That is your responsibility, as it is mine. But we were not the first to face such questions.

History in this country and around the world shows us, again and again, that when governments create environments of war — when they blur the line between law enforcement and occupation, when they vilify and demonize and reward hatred, when they call the basic exercise of fundamental rights an act of terror — innocent people are hurt. History is unambiguous on this point. The incentives are clear, the outcomes predictable, the harm profound. What is new is us — here, now — being asked whether we will accept it. This is not about left versus right. It is about whether we are willing to say: this is not who we will continue to be.

Each generation is tested in ways it does not choose. This is ours.

As an elected official, my tools are limited. I can ask questions. I can push for policies that reduce harm. I can insist on accountability. But as a human being, our responsibility is broader: to speak when silence would make us complicit in something we know, in our bones, is wrong.

Our fates are bound up with another. We cannot change that. So, I am asking you to look inward — to the place where you decide what kind of person you are, and what kind of country you are willing to pass on.

That is the place where you know that there are lines a society cannot cross without losing something precious and hard to recover.

It’s the place where you know that once we convince ourselves that this is acceptable — that this is necessary, or normal, or deserved — we lose something of ourselves in the process.

That is a loss no policy, no election, and no victory will ever be able to repair.

Is that worth it?