16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY FEBRUARY 5-11, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Collective Bargain In a Minneapolis under siege, community bonds are holding strong through crisis. By Rev. Ingrid C. A. Rasmussen FORUM A few days ago, on my way to work, along the north side of the neighborhood middle school, I found myself in the middle of an ICE convoy. It was dropoff time. Kids. Backpacks. Parents waving. And then, right there, federal vehicles filled to the brim with masked men. So I started to beep my horn. I thought of Renée Good, who had been killed just a couple of days earlier. I took a deep breath and thought—no way, not here with our kids. As soon as I started honking, an SUV—one of the federal vehicles that had been behind me—pulled around and boxed me in, while another vehicle, filled with masked, armed men, sped away. It was Wednesday. On a regular city street. At 8-something in the morning. What? It’s hard for me these days to determine how we should operate—what portions of life before we should retain because they keep us grounded, and what should relinquish because these aren’t normal times, and we shouldn’t act as though we aren’t experiencing the siege of fascism. We try to hold together our homebound visits with our detention visits. We try to hold together our regular Sunday School preparation with the cries of kiddos who are losing their parents to unlawful arrests. We try to hold together our spiritual care with our sit-ins. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely new. We’ve lived through communal crises before. Some of us have lived through authoritarianism in our countries of origin, too. And some of us know all too well that our immigration policies have been punitive far longer than we’ve had masked men with two weeks of training and semi-automatic weapons in hand running around our streets. We all know that despair is a privilege we cannot afford. So we tell the truth. As people of faith, we tell stories—bible stories, community stories, unfinished stories. Because our stories are what keep pointing us toward a way of grace and mercy and strength and resilience and beauty and joy. I am holding on for dear life to the promise that faith gives us what we need—manna for today, manna for tomorrow. I am trusting that abundant life is stronger than anything or anyone that can box us in. I am clinging to the hope that mercy will beat those ARs into plowshares. And I am praying that grace will find us when we don’t get it right— because there is no “right” in this time, only our most faithful next step taken with our neighbors. I have been thinking about a story Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton tells about being in Louisville: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” That is how I feel when I look at our community right now. Suffering as we may be, we are shining like the sun. Rev. Ingrid C. A. Rasmussen is lead pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. Her writing has appeared in The Christian Century, Journal of Lutheran Ethics and other publications OPINION Despair is a privilege we cannot afford.
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