I was almost giddy Saturday morning while driving to the “No Kings” rally in my west central Minnesota town of Alexandria. I had reason to hope that Indivisible, which had planned the rally, would turn out 1,000 protesters in Douglas County, despite our county having voted for Donald Trump by a two-to-one margin. And I was still replaying in my head the events of Friday night, when my wife and I attended the annual Minnesota DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Humphrey-Mondale Dinner, where Gov. Tim Walz, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith and others spoke.
I was still replaying the events of Friday night, when my wife and I attended the Minnesota DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Humphrey-Mondale Dinner.
My hoping for a good turnout and my replaying the previous night’s speeches in my head was violently interrupted by a news report on the radio that Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, had been fatally shot in their home in Brooklyn Park and that state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, had also been shot.
More than a 1,000 people did show up at Alexandria’s Veterans Memorial Park, Indivisible estimated, most of whom didn’t know that DFL lawmakers had been killed and wounded until it was announced over a loudspeaker.
Minnesota is not a place where grief gets loud. The crowd fell silent at the news of the politically inspired killings, and I saw people holding quiet conversations with one another. We collectively observed a moment of silence for the victims. Then we fanned out along Alexandria’s main street. As we stood and waved, cars honked. Most of them were supportive, a few decidedly were not. We watched the cars pass and talked about Rep. Hortman. Some had met her. Some had worked with her. And all of us shook our heads at a state and country where things like this happen.
There’s a photograph of the Hortmans from Friday night’s DFL dinner; it may be the last photograph for which they ever posed together. They are frozen in that moment, smiling. His collar is open; her jacket is buttoned. I’m somewhere in the blurry background. I never met them. Still, we may have crossed paths unawares. My wife worked at a Brooklyn Park pediatric clinic near the Hortmans’ house. And there’s every chance I saw Hortman at the frenetic Minnesota State Fair DFL booth.
After growing up in Alexandria, I lived most of my adult life in Louisiana; I returned here a few years ago to help my mother, whose health was failing. Over the years, my mom and I shared a love of politics — or at least some politics. Mainly we shared a love of Paul Wellstone, who was campaigning for a third term in the U.S. Senate when he died in a plane crash in October 2002.
Wellstone’s name still inspires Democrats across the state. The DFL’s annual fundraiser might be called the Humphrey-Mondale Dinner, but on Friday night, it seemed to me that Wellstone was quoted the most often. “Thinking about one of my favorite Wellstone quotes today,” Rep. Hortman wrote in a Facebook piece earlier this year, “‘If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.’”
When Gov. Walz was highlighting legislation that had improved the lives of children and families in Minnesota, he was talking about work he’d done alongside Hortman.
In my town, I’m sometimes introduced to a person I don’t know with the endorsement, “That’s a strong DFLer.” Those words mean something about our values and how we live them. Melissa Hortman was a strong DFLer. She was a leader for abortion rights and gender-affirming care. She worked for gun safety legislation. After George Floyd was murdered, she led police reform efforts. When Gov. Walz was running for vice president and highlighting legislation that had improved the lives of children and families in Minnesota, he was talking about work he’d done alongside Hortman.
You could listen to Friday night’s speeches at the Humphrey-Mondale Dinner and know that it was fundraiser for a party that had lost a critical national election and that those who spoke harbored no illusions about how dire things had gotten since then. I was finding it difficult to find any hope until 89-year-old former Minnesota Secretary of State Joan Growe presented an award to Wintana Melekin, a young woman who moved to the U.S. from Eritrea when she was three years old and has become one of the state’s leading advocates for voting rights and social justice. My hope flickered when the two embraced.
Though Saturday’s political violence may threaten to extinguish that hope, I know that tomorrow we’ll get back to work in our local DFL. There’s a table at the Pride festival to staff, a booth at our county fair to set up. There’s a dark hallway in the back of the grandstand where discussions about reproductive freedom can get drowned out by stock car races. Most challenging of all, we need to find candidates to take on Republican incumbents, no matter the odds. Someone who can face a campaign the way Melissa Hortman did, over and over.
Sadness about the news hasn’t started to settle in, even as a suspect’s name and brief biography begin to emerge. We gathered Saturday morning to protest, among other things, a president who has encouraged and pardoned political violence. Even when hope is elusive, we’ll have to get by on determination.
Near the end of Saturday’s rally, I saw a family with three children walking back to their car. The youngest was still carrying a sign that seemed to sum up this day.
“I deserve better,” it read.
She does.
Minnesota does.
We all do.