My friend, P, and I had seen the social media videos of Singing Resistance for several days. Dozens, then eventually hundreds, of people walking through the streets of Minneapolis singing short, soaring songs of grief, hope, and nonviolent protest. Sometimes the videos showed people singing in large chapels. Most videos were outdoors.
Both my friend and I have conditions that affect our balance and mobility. Neither are perfect candidates for singing while walking a mile in the cold. But, considering our options for community action, we’re even worse candidates for activities with a higher risk of getting tear-gassed.
Hence the attraction of Singing Resistance, a protest activity described as “lower-risk”. This January, our free time has filled with writing postcards, making calls to Senators and Representatives, boycotting, donating food and supplies, offering to remain on-call with an “evac car” for friends who are doing those high-risk actions – all the standard things in this strange time.
Ultimately, you can only do so much from your living room. There comes a point when you want to get out there and be with your city
Singing Resistance has existed in Minneapolis for only about two weeks – since just days after Renée Nicole Good was shot and killed. In that time, they grew from a few hundred people to four thousand on-call singers. We learn this when P discovers she does know someone who’s gotten into the group. Shared by friend-to-friend invitation only, and understandably protective, it isn’t exactly easy to get in.
We make the friend-connection, and the notifications arrive. Soon we’re making plans for the next afternoon: Sunday, February 1st. Practice will be at Westminster Presbyterian in downtown Minneapolis. From there, we’ll walk a one-mile route past two hotels where ICE agents are staying and then back to the church.
The musical selections for this particular action: Songs that encourage defection.
I wonder to myself whether any agents will actually be in their rooms on a Sunday afternoon. But I suspend my disbelief for the moment. Surely, they work in shifts, given the number of raids and assaults that have happened here in the middle of the night. Regardless, the organizers are clear that they have no illusions any ICE agents will make their way out of the hotels, weeping, genuinely touched by our serenades, and ready to repent. That’s not how this works.
The notifications include a reflection on how encouraging defection of military and regime personnel is “a tactic that has been used by civil resistance movements throughout history to erode the power of oppressive regimes.” Like all nonviolent practices, it’s not a quick solution. It takes time. Years. Not days.
When humans try to force others to cater to them, they eventually resort to violence. As SciFi author Issac Asimov once put it, “Violence is the last refuge of incompetence.” Coercion may effect the illusion that one has successfully forced another to obey. But it never yields lasting change because, news flash, no one likes being oppressed.
Thankfully, those who long for a more peaceful and equitable planet, also seem to be the primary practitioners of slow-time transformation. We think in century-long timelines. We midwife transformation that will take generations to fully birth. We plant seeds that our great-grandchildren will harvest.
Gradual, organic change is the permanent kind.
'YOU CAN JOIN US TOMORROW'
We arrive at Westminster half an hour early, and the place is already packed. By 2 p.m. it is overflowing, with about a hundred in a standing room crowd in the lobby. The pastor lets us know: our crowd is close to two thousand.
The co-leaders share their hopes for the day and precautions we will take. One person, S, shares more about “encouraging defection”. This practice was used by Otpor! (Serbian, meaning “Resistance”), a nonviolent resistance movement that opposed the dictatorship in Serbia in the late 1990s:
Members of the Otpor movement regularly visited the homes and workplaces of police and military members to deliver the message: “You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow.”
It took two years. On October 5, 2000, Slobodan Milosevic, who had recently refused to concede after a lost election, ordered lethal force against hundreds of thousands of protestors. But his military, which now had connections with the protest movement, refused to shoot at their unarmed fellows. The military would not obey. The regime collapsed within two days.
After hearing about Otpor, we start choir practice. Each song is no longer than a catchy chorus. They are simple chants with easy-to-learn musical patterns. We catch on fast.
Some written by the folks who lead us in song. Others by an artist group known as ThePeacePoets. One written by Minneapolis song-leader, Annie Schlaefer, is particularly haunting: We walk the same ground / But we’ve been torn apart. / Put down your weapons / Come sing your part.
After about forty minutes of choir practice, it’s time to go serenade some of the President’s toughs.
'SHOW US YOUR COURAGE'
The crowd pours down the stone steps of Westminster Presbyterian, a river of people running onto Nicollet Mall. Many carry signs – messages calling for peace, justice, and humanity. There are children of all ages, babies in packs, and adults of all ages too. Several, like me, walk with canes or trekking poles or walkers. We move at a contemplative pace. Slow enough, I manage just fine.
The singing begins as soon as the first of us hit the pedestrian avenue. Our voices rise and echo off the canyon walls of downtown. Curious faces look down from upper-story shops and lofts. People on the sidewalks film us. Some smile. Some grow excited and join us – that being the one other way a person can join Singing Resistance: happen upon them and start singing.
We stop outside the two hotels that house ICE agents and sing an entire song several times over. The most apt one, another by Schlaefer, has a beat to it and soon has the crowd rocking out: It’s okay to change your mind. / Show us your courage / leave this behind! / It’s okay to change your mind / and you can join us / join us here any time.
Along our route, we pause briefly to sing outside the downtown Target building. It becomes clear that we are singing, not only to certain badly-broken violent individuals, but also to the corporations enabling them – compliant businesses, corporate hotel brands.
It feels good to sing. The resonance and the echo fills the ears and chest. But I’ll admit, I’m not deeply moved spiritually until our out-and-back route takes us past another group of nonviolent protestors. About a dozen people stand with Iranian flags and posters describing the atrocities in Iran. No, things have not improved there, even though they’ve fallen out of the news cycle here.
I see this other small group of protestors, and I am broken by a poverty of anything to offer them. I have nothing to give but my acknowledgement that this, too, is not right.
'HERE COMES THE DAWN'
We pass by this group once more, on our way back. Something shifts then. Members of our crowd begin to physically reach out to the Iranian Americans. We keep singing, but many in our group pause. Hands touch hands. Hands rest on shoulders. A few cautious side-hugs.
The song-leaders change our chorus to one by Heidi Wilson, which they did not teach us earlier, but we learn in seconds: Hold on / hold on / My dear ones / here comes the dawn.
Singers break from that chant to say, one after the other: This is for you too. We haven’t forgotten you. I am so sorry you have lost so many.
Some among the other group are moved to tears. They thank us for seeing. For reading about the cost of protesting in Iran. No one is actively protesting there right now – would you if your government slaughtered over 6,000 of your fellow protestors? But that hardly means things are fine. Nothing has improved.
It’s yet another timeline measured in centuries.
Some of us make eye contact. Where words fail, we try to say, with a look or a touch, something too big: You matter. Your dead loved ones matter. Your grief and fear matter. I have not, and will not, forget your devastation in the midst of my own people’s pain.
'SONGS, SIGNS, PRESENCE, PERSISTENCE'
Back at P’s home afterward, her family and I process our “lower-risk action”. We learn that, in Portland, people were recently tear-gassed for a similar peaceful gathering, one full of families, elders, and children. There is no such thing as a lower-risk action anymore. We were lucky today.
That night, I ponder what it means to join a 2000-person choir within an active conflict zone. Our songs were, as stated, a first message in a bottle. Stop this. Become dissatisfied. Remember you are human.
That invitation wasn’t limited to ICE and CBP officers. We aimed our voices up toward Target managers, and we sent innumerable cell phone videos out into the ether. We have no idea who actually needs this invitation, repetitively, for years.
Business CEOs. Politicians. Fiscal conservatives who voted for this administration. People who didn’t vote. People who have looked away from human suffering so long, apathy is now a trained response. It’s okay to change your mind. We sang that to all of them.
Then there was also the deeper message we sang to ourselves, one of identity and commitment. I think of the protest movement in Iran. I think of the International Campaign for Tibet, and Women of Zimbabwe Arise, and Parents Circle in Israel-Palestine, and so many other nonviolent peace and justice movements around the world. We are part of that greater flow now, fighting for the most foundational human right– peaceful existence – with elemental human tools: Songs, signs, presence, and persistence.
Anika Hanisch has lived in Montana for almost 25 years, but she was raised in the Twin Cities. She wrote this piece while staying in Minneapolis for a couple weeks, volunteering for Longfellow Nokomis Messenger, Southwest Voices, and Midway Como Frogtown Monitor.
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