That was my Facebook post searching, I assumed in vain, for my treasured bike. I have lived in Minneapolis for essentially my entire 52 years, and I am not leaving. It has been a remarkable few years here — for the whole world really — and we've had more than one experience with being robbed.
On Christmas morning 2020, someone broke the window of our front door with a golf club and stole our Christmas presents along with some other items. It's all just stuff and I tend not to get too worked up about stuff; it comes, it goes. But my sister's bike? That's another story.
When I tell people these stories, the response is always "How terrible, don't you feel violated?" — and really, I don't. I don't find it particularly scary or traumatic, though my family may disagree.
What I feel is sad. Sad that as a country with so much wealth and potential so many people feel that robbery is their best or only option. There will always be dumb kids who steal stuff for kicks, but I believe most of the crime in our city goes beyond that.
We don't take care of people as a whole. We cut funding for mental health, education, preschool, health care — the list goes on. We have a chance to change our system of policing and we choose not to. We refuse to regulate guns. Then we are upset when crime escalates. It sounds naive even to my ears, but maybe if we dedicated our vast resources to people who are suffering and never had the leg up most people I know did, we could start to address the real causes of crime. Sounds so simple and proves so difficult.
