Letter from St. Paul

Our friend and downstairs neighbor Jamie Borgan of the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance sent us this dispatch, with photos, from the police lines outside the Republican National Convention.

By Jamie Borgan

It’s 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and I’m heading east on Interstate 94 from Minneapolis on my way to southern Minnesota for dinner with my family. The drive should take about an hour and a half; I should arrive at a polite hour with enough time for small talk and maybe even a chance to help put a meal together.

Passing through St. Paul on my way east I pass a police car parked on the shoulder of the freeway, then a state patrol car, then several more police cars from counties all over the state. I’m approaching the center of this week’s political hullabaloo, the site of the Republican National Convention.

The Convention hasn’t been far from my thoughts this week. Driving in Tuesday morning, my first sight of downtown St. Paul had been freeway overpasses crowded with smiling sign-bearers, holding sheets and cardboard bearing messages about peace and patriotism. All week, the evening news and morning newspaper had been featuring images of waves of people gathering in protest of war and energy policies, as well as suited Republicans striding purposefully across the convention stage, shaking hands, hugging, and waving to crowds. I’d overheard people discussing protester and police clashes in coffee shops with colorful language and had fielded frequent and fervent calls from friends in response to Sarah Palin’s Wednesday night speech. I’d noted a mammoth amount of political bumper stickers, including one that said beguilingly and somewhat endearingly “I love this country so f#*$ing much!!” I had even passed through St. Paul on Wednesday morning, frowning disconcertedly at the National Guard troops milling around downtown, lending the normally contained city an air of a South American capital city in the midst of a coup.

By Thursday, I’m set to wash that convention right out of my hair and drive straight through to the sprawling cornfields and winding gravel roads of southeast Minnesota. But then, I look up at an overpass and see those sign-holders at one end of the bridge and police in full riot gear at the other.

I take my exit, heading south, and then……..take the first exit off the freeway, park my car, and barely remember to see if the meter needs plugging as I clamber out. Perhaps as a nod to my intensely polite Midwestern forebears, the first thought that goes through my head as I walk back toward the freeway is “Geez, I’m going to be so late for dinner,” but I’m quickly drawn into the moment as more police cars, bearing the names of various Minnesotan counties, many of them far (geographically and socially) from St. Paul traverse the streets. I’m following two young men toward the Capitol building and learn from eavesdropping that there’s a large group of protesters standing on one side of the freeway that had intended to march all the way to the Excel Center, but had been prevented from crossing the freeway. I make small talk with them briefly and learn they are two bartenders who got off a long shift, had a few drinks and thought they’d walk on over, and it occurs to me that they are mostly interested in the frenzied commotion of it all. Of course, the next introspective moment allows me to realize my motivation in hurrying TOWARD the unfolding scene is not really that much different, though I would probably couch it in rhetoric about the importance of civil liberties if asked.

As I approach the Capitol mall, I pass a group of maybe twelve police officers wearing full riot gear. They seem so out of place on the nearly deserted street that I’m almost amused by their presence. The sun is just beginning to set, casting golden hues over their helmeted faces, and it’s a beautifully temperate late summer afternoon, yet they’re holding batons and wearing Kevlar. Don’t they know that this is the kind of evening that calls for a friendly game of ultimate frisbee at their local park?

The possibility of amusement is dampened pretty quickly, however, as I move closer to the Capitol building and encounter more and more police. Bemusement becomes incredulity, which is quickly accompanied by a deep feeling of discomfort.

The center of the action consists of approximately twenty people walking and riding bicycles in a circle in the street. Several of them are carrying signs, and disorganized chanting erupts now and then. On the periphery of this circle, there are hundreds of people, some carrying signs or wearing “Legal Observer” hats, many frenetically taking pictures, though the majority appears to be milling earnestly around, talking into cell phones, furrowing their eyebrows, and commenting sparely to others gathered. As I walk toward the bridge over the freeway, I hear one man say somewhat derisively into his cell phone, “Yeah, we’ve got a bike circle going on here.”

And on the periphery of this somewhat aimless and restless energy? Uniformed and intimidatingly armed policemen, yes, mostly men, though I do see a few women in uniform.

The presence of so much armor and weaponry lends the gathering a surreal tension: glorious sun, concerned citizenry, excited media, and bared batons.

I stake a place on the bridge and quickly climb up onto the concrete railing along with dozens of others to survey the scene from high ground. A middle-aged couple looks over at me and says ironically “how do you like this?” as a fleet of police officers appears at the end of the bridge. They’re organized into columns five deep and they span the width of the bridge, totaling at least a hundred. For the first time, it occurs to me that I’m wearing really impractical shoes for this sort of activity; they’re new and clunky and have already given me a blister on the walk over. This thought occurs to me when I comprehend that people have started to run toward us, trying to move away from the advancing line of police, whose black helmets and face shields strike me as Star Wars-like.

The couple next to me holds firm, even as a group of mounted police trot by, and perhaps because of this couple or my own paralyzing incredulity, I too stand resolutely as the lines come closer. Finally, the man next to me says, “this is our city, this is our bridge,” to which I reply in a somewhat spacey tone, “I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

I wait until I can see the faces at the front of the advancing columns of batons and am given a verbal mandate to get off the bridge. The group of protesters and onlookers (which am I again?) is herded off the bridge and toward another overpass, where more police wait; again, I stake out a place atop a low wall, next to a line of bike cops and soon start talking to a woman standing there. She begins the conversation with the same note of confused incredulity that’s pulsing through my mental ticker tape.

“Can you believe this?” she muses. “Not really,” I answer. We chat for a while, and she tells me her friend is one of the bike cops wearing a gas mask; she tells me he’s been texting her and telling her not to come down, but she feels compelled to see it unfold. A lawyer who says he’s representing some of the journalists arrested Monday joins our conversation. He shakes his head in disbelief as a ring of mounted police wearing gas masks surrounds the remaining protesters and begins to give orders to them to sit down and be peacefully arrested.

It’s well after 6.00 by this point, and I pull out my phone and see several missed calls from my cousin.I quickly dial her number, and she asks if I’m close to Mantorville. I pause guiltily and confess that I’m still in St. Paul; her tone is clipped, “what?” My response is jumbled and harried, but upon hearing where I am and what’s happening, she says gravely, “Oh, I wish I was there.”

I promise to leave and do at that point, or try to. Every street within a four block perimeter is blocked by a row of police who sternly tell me I can’t walk down the street.
“Can’t?” I want to say, wondering with provocatively adolescent energy what they mean by that. It’s unfathomable to me that I represent a threat to the peace and safety of St. Paul, Minnesota. I speculate deeply about the mental ticker tape of these (mostly) men. Are they analyzing me as a potentially dangerous troublemaker, me with my blistered feet and missed-dinner guilt? Are they convinced that whatever actions they might need to take that day would be warranted by the threat posed by uncontrolled protesters who are in turn worried about the threat posed by uncontrolled police?

I’m grateful to have seen and participated in this interstice between the rhetoric of civil rights and the practice of exercising them, but this militaristic response to the peaceful assemblage of a few hundred Minnesotans is unnerving to put it mildly. I finally reach my car and eventually reach my family, but the questions and skepticism and furrowed eyebrows still linger.