We See What We Are: The Strength in Our Communities

A version of this piece first appeared under the title “Minneapolis, San Diego and the morals that make community” in the Times of San Diego.

When the violent federal intrusion into Minneapolis began, it was clearly meant to be an example for communities around the country. And an example it has become, just not remotely as its architects intended.

The writer Anaïs Nin famously wrote that “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” In Minneapolis, a militarized federal presence, caught up in the fever dream of invasion, saw only criminals: immigrants who didn’t belong, residents who protected them, protestors who defended them, and bystanders who got in the way — all of them impediments to a mission ostensibly designed to protect a community it never wanted or attempted to see.  

Minneapolis, on the other hand, saw something entirely different. It saw a community being torn apart, its values shredded, its people terrorized and even killed. It looked around and saw fellow citizens and fellow human beings. It saw the rule of law being violated by the public officials whose job it was to uphold it. And it saw the conscience of a nation crying out for voices still brave enough to express it.

What Minneapolis saw, which federal forces missed, was simply what it is: an American community and the fabric that knits it together. We see what we are.

What Minneapolis saw became the source of its courage to protest, push back, organize, speak out, persist, and tell the truth in the face of official lies and intimidation. That has become the real, lasting example set by this sorry and tragic episode. It is an example not of a city or state driven into submission as a warning to others but rather as a reminder of who we are as communities and as a people across America.

We can respect and uphold immigration laws and be compassionate. We can observe the rule of law for immigrants and for public officials. We can deeply disagree with each other and refrain from violence, especially the violence of a state acting against its own people.

We can hold fast to our democratic ideals.

Othering and Belonging Institute founder john powell, whose work was so seminal in Prebys Foundation’s embrace of belonging as a core ethos early in our journey, noted in a recent blog that the Constitution’s guarantee of due process for everyone “is not a loophole or a technicality. It is a moral commitment. It reflects an understanding that unchecked power is dangerous, and that the dignity of each person is bound up with the dignity of us all.”

At a community level, people can see this connectivity far more easily than perhaps we can in other contexts. Here our lives touch and interweave in ways we cannot ignore.

Decades ago, the late essayist Barry Lopez, who wrote brilliantly about place and the need for the modern world to rid itself of the psychology of dominance, discussed the Spanish idea of la querencia. It refers, he wrote, “to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn.”

He added, “The idea itself is quite beautiful — a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.”

Yet la querencia is not some benign notion of home — it is a hard-won place found through adversity. It is the spot where, when pushed, we rediscover who we are and find again the strength that sustains us. Pushed to abandon our principles, each other, and the strangers in our midst, here we find courage and purpose in each other, rediscover our deepest beliefs, reawaken our strength of character.

This period in American history seems to devalue character more than any in our lifetimes. Yet our character can be reclaimed, and I believe already is, one community at a time. That, for me, is the enduring symbolism of Minneapolis. Singular though any one city or town or place might be, in America today, community itself is our querencia. I am grateful for the example.

For us, when we say we stand with the good people of Minneapolis and lament their pain, it means we extend all the support we can. But it also means we stand with the good people of San Diego, and through them, with the good people of every community determined to hold open what john powell calls “the circle of human concern” and who are working every day to keep it open — for all of us.

Grant Oliphant is the CEO and president of the Prebys Foundation. Grant is a former Board chair of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and of the Communications Network.