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My partner, an immigrant from Brazil, shows love through acts of service. At first, I was confused. I had been raised to see romantic love, partner love, as centered on acts of adoration, big and intense actions designed to make me, the beloved, feel exceptional. My partner, who is romantic but not in that way, finds this focus on exceptional love confusing. She bonds with other immigrants on the strangeness of the adoration economy, sharing stories of childhoods where love was pragmatic, not gilded. My feminist self took an embarrassingly long time to feel the depth of love embedded in my partner doing my laundry or putting together a new shelf for my office.
I grew up with the acts-of-service kind of love but my family didn’t describe it as love. It was about duty. And survival.
I think about all of this, sitting in my Minneapolis home, reading essay after essay about the mutual aid and collective care that is everywhere on these streets. Some of the reporting is laced with the tinsel of adoration: Minneapolis is exceptional! Better than anyone! No one else is like this!!! I want to reach out and grab the authors by the pen and say, Hey, that isn’t what this is. Please don’t exceptionalize us. This is a steadiness of love as caring for your neighbor, love as meeting the material needs of someone nearby. There is nothing new or fancy or romantic about it. It’s just love.
Junauda Petrus, poet laureate of Minneapolis, said it beautifully — and off-handedly — to me during a recent phone call:
What people are vibing off of right now is getting to know each other, spending time together. For a lot of folks, this isn’t how they were raised. Or they were raised like this and they forgot. They have forgotten how to meet each other, to just spend time with each other — not as people who agree on everything but as people who are just part of the same thing. In the [Twin] Cities, we’re building a technology of togetherness.
In writing this piece, I thought about what would help people in my communities to feel seen and what might help those living elsewhere to have clear examples of what we are doing here. I called a range of beloveds, all of them doing so much, and some of them unable to leave their homes and benefiting from the care being spread around, and asked them this: Would me interviewing you for an essay be nourishing or would it feel like another thing you have to cross off your list? And some people said, “Ouch, not this week,” or “No, we are being targeted too much and it feels scary,” or “I love you, Susan, but god, I am tired.” And they said things like, “If you need it, I will make it happen,” and I got to say back to them, “No, beloved, it’s ok. I got you. You got me. That’s how it works.”
Acts of Service and Mutual Aid Sustain Minneapolis as It Remains Under Assault
Not everything happening in Minneapolis is new. All of this care builds on the relationships already in place. My friend Hannah (who is using a pseudonym to protect her mutual aid network) said that even before “Operation Metro Surge,” some parents were already taking turns bringing children to school and having conversations with teachers and school staff about school safety.
“In October, when things started to get scary, we — the parents at our kid’s school — set up a Google Voice number and email and got the school admin to informally connect us with parents who needed help with rides for their children and groceries,” Hannah said. “It started small and then it grew. Now there are 88 families, or 106 students — a fifth of the school population — that we are supporting. About 40 of those kids, the ones still attending school in person, get rides to and from school from 30 different drivers made up of parents and neighbors and grandparents…. We have patrols who watch drop-in time, end of day pick-up, recess, and special events, and they call an alert when ICE is spotted nearby, which happens too often.”
And the community isn’t just coming together around school and student safety.
“We have set up grocery and food shelf deliveries. We have someone helping with Delegation of Parental Authority forms for just in case a parent is kidnapped and their child is left behind. We also have a lawyer who can file habeas petitions. There are seniors at a nearby assisted living facility who do the laundry for those sheltering in their homes,” Hannah said. “There are rent funds and funds for bills that sometimes include paying for bonds and legal fees. We have a doctor who can do medical house calls and we are connected with a group of vets who can help people with their pets.”
Violet (who is using a pseudonym to protect herself) is a nurse who mostly works with prenatal and postnatal patients through a community clinic. She said that the old lines that defined professionalism have shifted dramatically: “I had never called people from my personal cell phone before. I had never been to their houses. I’m not supposed to work outside of the clinic.” She is part of the vast network of health care workers finding ways to shift their systems so that institutional care is more accessible, and showing up outside of that institutional care to make sure patients have what they need.
“My adult daughter has been helping, packaging up food and driving with me for deliveries. This means she sees patient names and addresses — all of the things we aren’t supposed to do,” Violet said. “I know there’s professional risk here, but every person I know cares more about making sure that we are doing this in a way that keeps our neighbors safe. That is why we are here. Every other risk just seems so inconsequential.”
I talked with another dear one about the relationship between patrols and neighborhood care, how they are overlapping circles that each inform the other. Jamie Schwesnedl from Moon Palace Books talks about how these acts of service are woven together in a lot of families. In his case, he explained that he takes on rapid response and patrol duties while his partner delivers groceries and other supplies that have been delivered to Moon Palace, a neighborhood site for supply drop-off.
And still, he reflects, the lines between rapid response and mutual aid are blurrier than you would think:
My partner is able to receive deliveries like groceries and diapers at the bookstore and then be available for people who come to do pick-up, checking their names against the spreadsheets and ensuring that everyone is who they say they are. Our front counter has become a free zone for whistles, signs, and flyers, and people coming to get groceries to deliver also pick up whistles. When I am on patrol, I drop things off between places, change light bulbs, or carry boxes, or plunge toilets, or pick up things people have dropped off to bring to a patrol meeting or some other form of neighborhood organizing. I don’t deliver anything for those sheltering in place during this time, but there are deliveries needed to support the people on patrol who are facing down ICE. Any time I leave home, I have an eyewash water bottle for pepper spray, bullhorns, and snacks and hand warmers.
Different families, he said, split up acts of service in different ways and everyone is careful to protect those targeted by ICE.
This Love Isn’t Exceptional — It’s Just Love
It is a dangerous idea that any one person has to carry everything on their shoulders. We take turns. A teacher of mine once said to me: Never underestimate who might be willing to show up when things are tough. Who we are in moments of crisis and struggle is not always the same as who we are in easier times.
And people around us are not always who we think they are. Ojibwe writer Marcie Rendon told me the story of one of her neighbors, a person who flies the American flag and has red, white, and blue bunting on their house all year round. Somewhat reclusive, everyone assumed that this older white man was a right-leaning person, but really, she said, he’s just someone from rural Minnesota who loves his country, loves the flag, and hates what is happening. He came to one of the block meetings and people were surprised. Now he is just one of the many showing up in the neighborhood.
Everyone I interviewed for this piece, and the six people who said “no,” and the 15 people whose names I wrote down but then didn’t reach out to because I ran out of time, is beloved to me. Intimate and known. And there are so many more — people I will never meet and who are more than two degrees removed from the hundreds I do know and they are protecting their communities as well.
When I look away from my to-do lists and Signal threads and worries about those I know and those I don’t, when I take a moment to exhale, I keep seeing this beautiful web being woven in Minnesota: not with new materials but with wisdom that was already here. When I stop, I can feel this net with my hands, this connection when I am on patrol and we pass that group of three on the corner of Cedar and Lake, this connection as I see someone who I know pull boxes of baby formula out of their trunk, look left and right, and then head over to a drop-off point.
This is not romantic love, not some kind of exceptionalism that wants to put everything in bright lights and roses. No, we are all the same people as we were last year. Some folks need to be the main character of every story, white saviorism is real, Black beloveds have to watch as those who did not show up in these kinds of numbers when George Floyd was murdered show up now, and each of these little pods of neighbors organizing legal aid and groceries do not always have access to their best selves. We are real people in real time, and these are acts of service and they are a form of love, but it is not exceptional love. It is just love.
I remember this very old fishing net someone showed me years ago, guiding my fingers to feel where the net had been repaired over and over again, like scars in the fibers that strengthen rather than break. ICE is sharp like knives, nicking and sometimes shoving and tearing through this connected set of scars and fresh material. There are wounds, this is violence, and some of you are being stopped on the road because of how you are perceived and I am not being stopped and none of this is ever okay… and still, I feel the pull and tug of a net that is larger than anything I have experienced before. Is there anyone in these cities not showing up in some way? I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone with words other than: How can I help?
There is a net and it has always been here, it is always here. This is not exceptional. There is nothing new here. All that is happening in Minnesota is that some of the confusion is fading and what is visible is the link and weave and stumble and steady between us. May we keep repairing it as it frays, from those outside and from the rising tension we hold within, and may this net grow with wisdom and may bodies tired of holding themselves up alone someday feel like they can relax into the steady certainty of something much bigger than the size of their skin.
This love is not exceptional. It is the acts-of-service kind of love. The kind of love that says to your neighbor: Let us take care of each other. I am going to remember you. It’s the kind of love that says: This, this is how we survive. Together.
Susan Raffo is a writer and bodyworker living in Mnisota Makoce, Minneapolis. You can find out about her work at www.susanraffo.com.
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