Minneapolis Winter

A time of reckoning.

A second protester has been shot and killed in Minneapolis, which makes more urgent than ever the need for an independent commission to investigate the violence. But that won’t happen unless a lot changes.

Once again, many people seem already to have taken sides. Administration officials have made it clear in dramatic language that they already know what happened and where guilt and innocence lie. They’ve also made it clear that they do not intend to cooperate with local officials, or with anyone, to conduct what might plausibly be called an independent investigation.

We may be crossing the Rubicon. It’s alien to our values and form of government for our leaders to refuse, in cases such as these, to conduct investigations guided by established rules in which all facts are considered prior to reaching conclusions. A country that no longer seeks to determine truth according to impartial procedures rather than politically desired outcomes is no longer a functioning republic, at least in the sense that the American founders intended.

More broadly, it appears likely that things in Minneapolis will get worse before they get better. Much of Minneapolis civil society is determined to oppose and publicly protest the federal government’s actions, and the federal government seems equally determined to stay the course and even double down.

I remember as a child in Mississippi witnessing the “Mississippi Summer”of 1964, in which my state became, for much of the nation, a symbol of everything that was going wrong regarding civil rights for African-Americans. Many people from across the country went to Mississippi that summer to assist the civil rights movement, and two of them were murdered (a third victim was from Mississippi).

It may be that Minneapolis is becoming, again for much of the nation, just such a symbol. We may be approaching a time of reckoning.