Tag: Minneapolis

PROTEST as TEACHER: The 21st Century Has Come of Age

A ballooning generational shift is challenging aged authority.

PROTEST as TEACHER: The 21st Century Has Come of Age

By Susu Jeffrey / Original to Wings of Change / April 8, 2026

Melissa Olson’s (Minnesota Public Radio 3/9/26) article on the Native “Prayer Camp” at Mni Owe Sni (Coldwater) National Park lacked historic background. Indian people getting evicted from their land is an old story. At Coldwater Spring on May 5, 1820, Lt. Col. Henry Leavenworth marched to the spring and the U.S. government has never left. The military assumed exclusive control over the water and land that is still considered federally “owned” despite a doubtable treaty

Olson actually wrote that the campers would leave the Prayer Camp in three days (on March 11). That did not happen. Protestors said no—no decision had been made and they wondered about the source of the information—if it was wishful (obedient) thinking in print.

The Whipple Federal Building where ICE and Border agents have run Operation Metro Surge for the last several months looms in the background of the Coldwater Springs camp near Fort Snelling. (Photo by Alex Baumhardt/Minnesota Reformer)

Indigenous youth established the Prayer Camp on February 9, 2026 in order to hold a four-day ceremony on traditional Dakota sacred land in support of resident “illegal aliens” being incarcerated in what we now know are substandard prison-like conditions. Federal agents were using non-legal methods to capture foreign-looking civilians based on appearance, deception, location, lies and threats and in pursuit of fulfilling mandated 2,000 people per day arrest quotas.

The Whipple federal seven-story building housing ICE (Immigrant and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol (CBP, Customs and Border Patrol) is an office building, not a jail where, for example, beds, medical personnel and toilet facilities for groups are not available. Whipple is the backdrop of the Prayer Camp.

Simultaneously war fever was raging. The Trump and Netanyahu regimes were threatening war against Iran. Indeed on February 28, 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched hundreds and hundreds of missiles against Iranian leadership and military installations. The U.S.-Israeli War has been deemed illegal under international ”laws of war.” On April 7, President Trump threatened to “bomb Iran back to the stone age.” Ninety minutes before his deadline the president pulled his fourth “taco” (Trump always chickens out), retreated, and called for a two-week ceasefire which Israel violated on April 8 by bombing Lebanon.

The Whipple Building is located within Fort Snelling at 1 Federal Drive, federal land since the contentious 1805 “Pike” Treaty, just across the freeway from Mni Owe Sni parkland. Prayer Camp tipis, the camp ceremonial staff and sacred fire were set up in view of Whipple.

Who Are the Real Indians?

The real Indians are people enrolled in federally recognized tribes, sometimes called casino Indians. Thousands of people who consider themselves Indigenous, who observe Indian lifestyle practices in dress, food, holidays, religion and philosophy are excluded from the culture they identify with.

There is a growing generational shift among younger Native-identified people who are challenging federally recognized Indian authority. A group of “legal” Indians amassed (at least one armed) at the Prayer Camp on March 5 and interrupted ceremonial plans. A confrontation of the legals with six younger camp leaders ensued with one legal getting arrested and the nonviolent campers feeling unheard. Prayer Camp organizers did not immediately agree to pack-up and leave as was expected.

This armed, violent breech of the Native ethic of peaceful behavior in a sacred, therefore “neutral” place, was a profound cultural blow to the young prayer campers. The youths had set up a camp according to strict traditional practices, they were fasting, sweating, praying and smudging, and in come angry Dakota federally recognized officials trying to force a stop.

The interrupters were apparently organized by Franky Jackson, Historic Preservation Officer for Prairie Island Reservation where more than 500 mounds have been counted from the long Native occupation of that Mississippi island area. Tragically now the island is home to two nuclear power reactors and a vast amount of hot nuclear waste. There is no national nuclear waste depository and no plan to ever move the dangerous garbage off-island. Instead the Indigenous people are being relocated.

Another Prairie Islander, the late spiritual leader Chris Leith, was very involved in the earlier 1998-99 Minneapolis protest encampment. Leith taught that water is the first medicine for all living things. He said Coldwater is one of the dwelling places of Unktehi, a powerful Dakota water spirit with life-giving as well as destructive qualities.

Leith instructed people to acknowledge, honor and respect this spirit by visiting and gifting the spring. He urged people to gather the medicine water whenever needed. Chris Leith’s gentle, positive teachings resulted in the Friends of Coldwater walks held on the day of the full moon each month for more than 25 years. In addition to a spiritual renewal walkers are treated to the changing roll of the wheel of the year.

Franky Jackson and the legal Indians having failed to dislodge the younger Prayer Camp activists called-in Arvol Looking Horse, 72, from South Dakota, 19thgeneration carrier of the white buffalo calf pipe, spiritual leader of Lakota, Nakota and Dakota peoples. In an hours-long meeting around the sacred fire with Whipple Building lights glowing in the background, Looking Horse, wearing regalia, said the Prayer Camp should be abandoned because it was located on burial grounds.

Mni Owe Sni (water-spring-cold) is not a place of burials. It is a drinking water source, a 10,000-year-old spring running even under the last (Wisconsin) glacier down the Mississippi River gorge. All springs are sacred because all life requires water and springs are neutral, belonging to all, sites of life and peace.

“Indian graves at the mouth of the St. Peter’s” river (now Minnesota River) a watercolor by Seth Eastman. Pilot Knob, across from Ft. Snelling with the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers below, was where birds would clean the bodies, the bones would fall to earth and be collected and interred.
Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

Adult bodies are about 70 percent water which corrupts and leaks out. That’s why you bury on a hill—and it’s closer to the sky god(s). Water obeys gravity and runs downhill. Springs surface when underground water veins run into bedrock. Springs are places where you have to bow, as in respect, to collect water.

Jim Redsky Anderson, late cultural spokesman for the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Tribal Community, talked about Dakota burials west of Minneapolis on a hill above Lake Minnetonka since “all the good places were already taken.” Indigenous existence in the area of the rivers confluence was documented by state archaeologist Dr. Robert Clouse who found a 9,000-year-old bison spear point.

Caught in the backwaters muck of the great rivers confluence the bison would have been brought down by a group of hunters and butchered on the spot, Clouse said, painting a word picture of the scene. The spear was rock from upstream near Mankato, Minnesota, where in 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged in the largest mass hanging in the United States.

It is unclear who misinformed Looking Horse about the history of Coldwater being a burial site since it is named Mni (water). Indian people are trained to respect elders, to never interrupt, to listen respectfully but it broke Looking Horse’s credibility.

The legal Minnesota tribes were not involved in the long 17-month encampment. The four recognized tribes are located outstate (away from the central business/government Minneapolis/St. Paul area) and did not support or participate in the earlier encampment that saved Coldwater from becoming a Twin Cities off-site airport parking lot.

The 1998-99 Minnehaha Free State and Four Trees Spiritual Encampment protestors stayed and stayed (17 months) until the trees they were trying to save were cut along with the safety harnesses of people in the tree-sits. The road was built; however, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was forced to raise the level of Highway 55 to protect underground flows to Coldwater Spring.

The encampment slowed down the destruction/construction business-as-usual process and led to saving 27 acres of Mississippi bluff top, now a National Park. It allowed tribes time to apply for (paper) recognition of Coldwater as a Dakota Sacred Site according to the National Park Service’s many rules. For campers it was a commitment to the common goal, personal dignity and the power of nonviolent protest producing a class of healers, listeners and citizens risking “good trouble” rather than a plod-along life.

In October 2005 two Dakota Natives and one non-native were ticketed at Coldwater Spring by federal authorities for “failure to obey a legal order.” Officials had blocked the entry to Coldwater with a locked gate and the three got inside, refused to leave and were ticketed. After fiddling around with the case for more than a year federal charges were dropped. It was not a ‘legal order,’ said the late Indian rights attorney Larry Leventhal because the Pike Treaty of 1805 was never verified. It’s hoo-ha.

Had the case gone to trial the federals could lose nine miles of land on either side of the Mississippi from the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi (the b’dota) upstream to the falls now called St. Anthony. That would mean losing Minneapolis, a chance the U.S. government did not want to take.

In other words, this is the seed of the Dakota Land Back argument. Leventhal said the case was the third time the question of the legality of the 1805 “Pike” treaty reached federal court, only to have charges dismissed rather than to possibly lose Minneapolis, the economic engine of Minnesota, to the Dakota oyate (nation).

1805 to 1945

Two years after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Lt. Zebulon Pike led a small detachment up the Mississippi River to see what the United States actually purchased from France. Without authority, Pike treated with two (of seven) Dakota headmen who agreed to the construction of two forts along the Mississippi but retained the rights “to pass, repass, hunt or make other uses of the said districts, as they have formerly done.”

The 1805 (Pike) Treaty with the Sioux was ratified but never “proclaimed” and has always been of murky legality. Nevertheless the U.S. government and the state of Minnesota (admitted to the Union in 1858) has consistently acted as if the Coldwater property was signed over to the U.S. The Dakota wanted guns and European trade goods; the Americans wanted to establish authority and profitability. The warring of Dakota and Anishinabe was bad for the fur trade business. By the late 1830s military forces began to forcibly evict civilians away from the pioneer settlement called Camp Coldwater ostensibly to preserve game and firewood.

In 1838 pioneer leader Abraham Perry, his wife and their six children were dispossessed when soldiers smashed their household goods, ripped off the roof and set the cabin on fire. Marie Ann Perry’s broken Spode China pieces still pop out of the ground in Spring after the thaw. She was the village midwife.

Coldwater is considered by some to be ”The Birthplace of Minnesota” since the soldiers who built Fort Snelling 1820-23 lived beside the spring. Coldwater was the potable water source for the Fort for nearly a century and also for the civilian community that supported the Fort with wives, babysitters, servants, translators, guides, missionaries and further off-site, liquor. The village of Swiss, Canadian, Irish, English, Native and African Americans included the community midwife, farms, trading posts, B.F. Baker’s stone warehouse, a steamboat landing, the St. Louis Hotel, blacksmith shops and stables.

Probably the most famous resident of Camp Coldwater and Fort Snelling was Dred Scott, who after returning to Missouri sued for his freedom from slavery in 1857 and lost because slaves were not considered citizens and therefore had no right to sue in the courts. The Dred Scott case is one of the most important cases in American history.

Fort Snelling was supplied with drinking water from barrels filled at Coldwater reservoir and hauled by horse-drawn wagons. Four to ten wagons a day were required with six horses each and two men from 1823 until after the Civil War.

In 1879-80 a coal-fired engine drew 921,600 gallons daily out of the Coldwater reservoir for storage in the water towers to supply Fort Snelling. From 1904 to 1930 supplemental water was drawn from a well at the base of a bluff along the Minnesota River. After 1930 Fort Snelling switched to water from the City of St. Paul. The nearby Veterans Administration used Minneapolis water beginning in the 1920s.

1945 to 1991, the Cold War and After

Coldwater was considered open parkland south of Minnehaha Regional Park until after World War II when by 1955 it was fenced off and developed into a secure Bureau of Mines cold war mining and metallurgy research facility. The research on venting mine air to prevent black lung disease was successful and spread worldwide as part of American postwar soft power largess. With the end of the Cold War in 1991 Russia lost its empire and the Bureau of Mines campus closed. Eleven buildings with offices, laboratories and warehouses were simply vacated and left to deteriorate.

The invitingly empty land and buildings began to be frequented by neighborhood kids, the homeless and street drug business. At the same time the Sierra Club formed a lobby group of volunteers to Stop the Reroute of Highway 55 and Save the (Minnehaha) Park. Park and River Alliance collected 12,000 dogwalker signatures against the road expansion but no government office would accept the petitions. Their lawsuit against MnDOT was dismissed on a technicality.

There was one emergency during the post-war Cold War period when national security was overruled and the public got past the six-foot chain link Coldwater fences. “In 1976 after months of draught,” wrote Carolyn Lyschik (10/21/2006) then of Minneapolis, “the city water developed an algae that was putrid and undrinkable by my husband who was very ill at the time. I made trips every other day to Coldwater Spring and stood in line to get the best tasting fresh water. We were so thankful for this vital resource. If it is still not polluted it should be a National Treasure!”

In 1880 the Coldwater reservoir could furnish 921,600 gallons of water pumped out daily. (Historical Study, Former U.S. Bureau of Mines, Twin Cities Research Center, final report by Barbara J. Henning, 10/2002, p. 22.) The next flow rate measure was reported in the early 1990s with the Highway 55 reroute dispute as 130,00 gallons per day (gpd). In the intervening century-plus ten years “development” happened with the loss of 791,000 gpd. More recently the 2024 Minnesota National River and Recreation Area flow rate for Coldwater Spring for the year 2024 was 69,552 gpd.

Yes, we have a water crisis in the state and city named after the Dakota word for water, Mni. Mni waconi, pronounced Min-ne wa-cho-ni, translated “Water is life,” literally, water makes life.

A looming emergency could be the thirst of AI when nuclear power’s electrically generated need for cooling water as well as data centers and electronic tech’s requirement for pristine water collide with domestic use. We can make a lot of things but not water. (Desalinization plants don’t make water. They remove salt from some water and recycle the salt as hyper-saline coastal water piped out about a half mile where most edible sea life exists.)

Unfortunately, the Great Medicine Spring in Minneapolis’ Theodore Wirth Park was dewatered for Interstate-394 in the 1980s. Native people were known to come from “hundreds of miles” to collect the healing properties of that medicine, now forever gone. The only other major water source in Hennepin County is Frederick Miller Spring in Eden Prairie which was recently saved from another upscale housing development.

When Saying NO Isn’t Heard

The “cult” around environmentalism started to take hold with noticeable climate changes. It was the mid-1990s; the proposed Highway 55 “reroute,” a freeway, got reduced to a four-lane highway. MnDOT really had to eat crow when Oklahoma Seminole repatriation expert Michael Haney testified about Iowa Indian remains in the area. State archeologist Dr. Robert Clouse found a 9,000-year-old bison spear point at the b’dota (Mississippi-Minnesota confluence) in Mendota in 1997. Polite opposition lost patience.

In the fall of 1998 local enviro groups and national Earth First! began an encampment in south Minneapolis, soon joined by the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota (non-federally recognized) Tribal Community. Neighbors hated the nightly drumming and singing. The press loved it and a bounty of public curiosity and donations poured in

Finally on December 20th of Christmas week in 1998, 803 police descended on the camp to arrest about 30 people at a reported cost of $15,000 per arrest. A blizzard was roaring, the police were savage, protestors were stunned. The coffee, donuts, muffins and box lunches for police totaled $7,309.90. Three days later a new sacred fire was lit a few blocks south on open state land nearer Coldwater Springs and the Four Sacred Trees Spiritual Encampment was established.

Unnecessarily brutal arrests continued throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall of 1999 as did community support. Trees were felled, tree-sits were devised to confront deforestation. On Thanksgiving seventeen turkeys were donated. On December 11, the second raid occurred with 26 arrests and the end of the four sacred trees.

During the 1999 trial from the second raid the state maintained that “the oaks could not have been sacred because they were only 137 years old.” Subtract 137 from 1999 and you get 1862, the year of the Dakota Uprising. Thirteen-hundred Dakota people were imprisoned over winter on the Mississippi flats below Fort Snelling. The mass hanging of 38 Dakota men occurred the day after Christmas.

It is believed the trees were planted when prisoner/hunters were released to provide meat for prisoners’ survival. The State wasn’t going to feed them. The state cruelly offered $200 for each Indian scalp, even into the early 1900s. Many Dakota and Ho Chunk people fled east to Wisconsin, north into Canada or west and south to become the Lakota and Nakota peoples.

“We know that the falls which came to be known as Minnehaha Falls, was a sacred place, was a neutral place, a place for many nations to come,” the late Eddie Benton Benai, a fullblood Anishinabe from northern Wisconsin and Grand Chief of the Mdewiwin Lodge (Medicine Society), said in court-ordered testimony (3/19/99). “Between the falls and that point (where the rivers meet) there were sacred grounds that were mutually held to be a sacred place. And that all nations used to draw the sacred water for the ceremony.”

Benai continued, “My grandfather who lived to be 108, died in 1942 (born 1834). Many times he retold how we traveled, how he and his family, he as a small boy traveled by foot, by horse, by canoe to this great place to where there would be these great religious, spiritual events. And that they always camped between the falls and the sacred water place.” Benai identified the Anishinabe (Ojibwe) along with the Dakota Nation, the Sauk and Fox (Mesquakie), and the Potowatamie as mutually using the land and agreeing “that it is forever a neutral place and forever a sacred place.”

The arrests and clearing of the Four Trees in December 1999 for road construction was called ”the last raid”; however now, 27 years later, a new camp was born. On February 9, 2026 on acknowledged sacred Dakota land a “Prayer Camp” was established by Indigenous youth in this dark time of immigrant abuse and another Middle East War (possibly World War III). Their demand was to be able to hold a four-day ceremony.

It took until March 15, 35 days, to hold the uninterrupted four-day ceremony and clear the Prayer Camp. It was as popular as a skunk to establishment Indian and white authorities.

In 1999 both Dakota and Anishinabe elders testified about planting four trees in the cardinal directions to point to sacred landscapes. Several examples are known to exist. Meanwhile Dan the Oakman cut tips of the horizontal great oaks as instructed by the International Oak Society, dipped them in hydrogen peroxide, sealed them in wax and shipped them off to southern Illinois to be grafted onto baby burr oaks. “You can’t graft oaks,” they say. Two years later former campers took a road trip to bring home the sacred oaks which were planted on a Mississippi bluff in Mendota and are producing lots of acorns.

In 2003 the late U.S. Representative Martin O. Sabo secured a $750,000 appropriation to update the Bureau of Mines Cold War research campus from an abandoned industrial site to “open green space.” It was a great disappointment to MAC; the Metropolitan Airports Commission wanted the land above the Mississippi gorge for off-site parking. Every federally recognized Minnesota Indigenous group plus others in the Great Lakes and Midwest applied to manage Coldwater. Dakota and Lakota tribes in Minnesota and neighboring states filled out the paperwork to have Coldwater declared a Dakota sacred site. One National Park superintendent had the audacity to claim “we own Coldwater.”

Owning water is a slippery concept. In favor of peace and neutrality Representative Sabo had the wisdom to legislate Coldwater Spring/Mni Owe Sni into “open green space,” a place of its own, a place apart. We are 26 years into a new millennium facing “global water bankruptcy” with aged authorities making war against each other using suicidal weaponry. Meanwhile eight million Americans are demonstrating for change and Native youth are fasting and praying for life. Consider ever-flowing 10,000-year-old Coldwater.

Susu Jeffrey is a poet and writer living in Minneapolis.

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Access is always free, but if you would like to help:
A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others.

Join us on Wings of Change

We still have much work to continue to do as many activists and organizations address current threats to our democracy and unjust actions against people of color and are making plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration. Here in Minnesota we are particularly targeted by the Trump regime with ICE immigrant law enforcement illegally arresting and deporting our neighbors who are mostly people of color. In spite of promises to withdraw ICE, the arrests continue. Other cities have been targeted as well, and they will try to target more to fill the detention centers they are building all over the country.

Sue Ann Martinson, Editor

“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions
to participate in the process of change.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.”
— Howard Zinn

April 9, 2026
Minneapolis, MINNEAPOLIS! by Susu Jeffrey

Minneapolis, MINNEAPOLIS!

The unprecedented ICE surge has the hallmarks of an occupation in some neighborhoods, as masked and heavily armed agents drive around in large SUVs, tussle with protesters and observers, and break into people’s cars and houses to make arrests. —Axios

By Susu Jeffrey / Original to Wings of Change / March 2, 2026

What an honor when The Nation nominated Minneapolis for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize! The initial butterfly-in-the-stomach thrill dissipated with the thought of what President Trump would do (next) if we got his award. The revenge-dealing, super bully apparently stays awake imagining schemes on his social media site while we make new signs for the next NO KINGS demonstration and grocery lists for shut-in neighbors.

NO HATE, NO FEAR! IMMIGRANTS ARE WELCOME HERE!
In Minneapolis hard times make good neighbors. If we want to eat tomatoes or reroof our buildings we need to pay local people willing to do the work. The law of economics requires low wage, compliant workers in Minneapolis like every other American city. We need childcare, eldercare, healthcare, farm workers, meat packers, independent restaurants and all the oil that lubricates western society where the dream of a richer future is the hook.

The Americana rainbow of Minneapolis is like “Eat Street,” (Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street) where Alex Pretti was shot to death by federal agents. My favorite restaurant is across the street from the people’s Alex Pretti memorial. They serve Vietnamese pho soup and cream cheese wontons or you could go donuts-coffee and local bands, Mexican, Vietnamese-French-bread sandwiches, Greek, Middle East, Malaysian, pizza or burgers and fries. Minneapolis has the population of a stew, a toothsome mix of ingredients harmonizing in one pot.

Why Minneapolis?

Why did President Trump decide to sic ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Control (Customs and Border Control) on the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul? Minnesota is the state that ranks 28^th among the 50 United States hosting “illegal aliens”? Trump has a perfect zero political success rating here; he does not study history (for example George Floyd) and he has difficulty separating his ego from reality.

Since the 1934 truckers strike where two people were shot dead by zealous enforcers (sound familiar) the Minneapolis model of citizen support for everyday people’s rights has echoed across the nation. The appalling executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti caused Gov. Tim Walz to label the president’s agents “untrained, aggressive” and noted that Trump “picked the wrong state to make an example of.” (CBS nightly news). This comment from the vice-presidential candidate who charmed his way through the 2024 campaign like a fatherly and practical human being who doesn’t lie.

Part of the Minneapolis social scene is political activism. Minneapolis-based peace groups were associated with the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the Campaign to Ban Landmines and the 2017 prize to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Furthermore Minnesota has the highest voter turnout in the nation. The midterm elections are coming up in November this year. Statistically the president’s party loses congressional seats in the midterms.

Since December 1, 2025, the 3,000 Gestapo agents of Operation Metro Surge made 4,000 arrests (they had a 2,000 per day quota) which the existing incarceration and judicial systems could not process. Among the innocent victims were two Native American children (to which rez would they be extradited), 5-year-old Liam Ramos in his blue bunny hat, and an Asian man wearing handcuffs, boxer shorts and plastic slip-on shoes in minus 9-degree weather who lived in a house formerly occupied by a man already in prison.

ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Self-Deports

Jonathan Ross and his second wife
Image: Daily Mail

Masked agents move household items from the Ross home. Image: Daily Mail

Agent Ross, 43, of Chaska, Minnesota, an upscale southwest Minneapolis suburb, fled his half-million-dollar home with his family after shooting Renee Good to death on January 7. He was quickly identified. Two nights after Ross killed Renee Good a Special Response Team in masks was seen removing boxes including electronics and family photos from Ross’s home. Ross told neighbors he was a biologist. Neighbors described him as a hardcore MAGA supporter. His father labelled him a “conservative Christian.”

The last words Renee Good spoke was to tell Ross “I’m not mad at you” while he circled her car making a video. Then there were shots and Ross is heard saying “f—ing bitch.”

Renee as captured by Ross’s camera just before he executed her. Image Wikipedia

“They had guns. We had whistles,” said Renee Good’s widow.

On the night of February 17 the Renee Good sidewalk flower bedecked memorial between 33^rd and 34^th Streets on Portland Avenue South was sprinkled with gasoline and set afire. A volunteer night guard discouraged the arson vandals, preventing damage from spreading.

Church, State, Media and the Public React

Catholic Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey called ICE a “lawless organization” and remarked on the importance of human dignity in a televised Christiane Amanpour interview. Pope Leo XIV urged people to “fast from violent language,” especially during Lent and Ramadan.

National Public Radio’s 1A program (1-1-2026) noted the frequency of the president’s people “ignoring judicial orders. The Trump administration doesn’t follow laws they don’t like.”

So pooh-pooh to the laws of God and the State. Still, most of us await the arrests of Jonathan Ross and Texas-based Border Patrol agents Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierez, 35, for the first-degree murders (intentional killing) of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

What is To Be Done?

Vote.

ICE’s budget has metastasized from $10 billion to $85 billion. “They have the kind of budget you would give to a standing army to fight an actual war,” David Miller wrote on Facebook. Miller advocates “neighborism.”

Congress controls the budget, “the power of the purse.” Congress can also impeach. Trump was impeached twice during his first term.

First Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection” of the January 7^th rebellion in and around the Capitol building which was thoroughly filmed. However our 100 U.S. senators failed to reach the required 66 votes getting just 57 votes for inciting an insurrection.

Then the state of Georgia impeached Trump for his post-election interference: “I just want to find 11,780 votes….” But that effort was dismissed by the Department of Justice policy of avoiding to prosecute a sitting president.

On January 28, 2026, the FBI seized those 2020 ballots from the Biden/Trump Fulton County Georgia elections warehouse even though they had been counted and recounted three times, by hand and by machine. Trump’s inability to accept his failed reelection bid bodes ill for the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. It is a nutter world when black and white paper proof translates into Alice in Wonderland technicolor.

In reality it’s another practice run by Trump at not believing our lying eyes. Here are the videos, here are the ballots. Minnesota is a voting state. Voting is a form of neighborism.

It feels good to vote, especially in overwhelming numbers, and you get one of those little red I VOTED stickers.

Voting feels like I-AM-DOING-SOMETHING:

I AM — SOMEBODY (A chant made famous by Jesse Jackson)

It is the next step after 100,000 people marched against Operation Metro “Siege.” The crowd was so dense an American flag-carrying friend said it almost felt claustrophobic.

The comb-overs, Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, plan to divide up the world with their bombs and guys in masks with guns. Look again at those old men hiding their shiny pates, white-knuckled trying to hold onto their fictions. America has been multicultural since the Vikings and the Conquistadores invaded. What would baseball be without immigrants?

George Floyd, Renee Good, Alex Pretti

George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin put him in prison for 22.5 years and that was for “unintentional” murder, murder two. The murder one, intentional killings using three bullets for Renee Good and nine or ten bullets to execute Alex Pretti are proof of intention.

“Democracy is stronger than fear,” says Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman, who survived an eight-bullet assassination attempt. Hoffman has just returned to his seat in the state capitol.

Wings of Change is entirely reader supported.
Wings invites you to subscribe.
To subscribe: Join us on Wings of Change

In this critical time hearing voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support WingsofChange.me as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media. Donate now to sustain Wings of Change.

Access is always free, but if you would like to help:
A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others.

Join us on Wings of Change

We still have much work to continue to do as many activists and organizations address current threats to our democracy and unjust actions against people of color and are making plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration. Here in Minnesota we are particularly targeted by the Trump regime with ICE immigrant law enforcement illegally arresting and deporting our neighbors who are mostly people of color. In spite of promises to withdraw ICE, the arrests continue. Other cities have been targeted as well, and they will try to target more to fill the detention centers they are building all over the country.

Sue Ann Martinson, Editor

“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions
to participate in the process of change.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.”
— Howard Zinn

March 2, 2026
Unicorn Riot: ICE in Minnesota Days 72-77

ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA

ICE in Minnesota — Days 72-77: ICE Raids Continue After Politicians Declare Operation Over, Food Security Plummets as Economy Damaged

Unicorn Riot / February 17, 2026

Wings of Change is entirely reader supported.
Wings invites you to subscribe.
To subscribe: Join us on Wings of Change

In this critical time hearing voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support WingsofChange.me as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media. Donate now to sustain Wings of Change.

Access is always free, but if you would like to help:
A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others.

Join us on Wings of Change

We still have much work to continue to do as many activists and organizations address current threats to our democracy and unjust actions against people of color and activists and make plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration. Here in Minnesota we are particularly targeted by the Trump regime with ICE immigrant law enforcement illegally arresting and deporting our neighbors who are mostly people of color. In spite of promises to withdraw ICE, the arrests continue. Other cities have been targeted as well, and they will try to target more.

Sue Ann Martinson, Editor

“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions
to participate in the process of change.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.”
— Howard Zinn

February 23, 2026
Ben Grosscup: Anti-ICE Protest Songs: “Come Out Ye Cowards ICE,” “Knock on the Door”

Now there’s many new words and many new names; Uniforms have changed but the knock is the same

This performance took place in Northampton, MA on
Sunday, January 11, 2026

On January 31, 2026, this performance was staged at a rally outside the Northwestern District Attorney’s office, where protestors called on DA David E. Sullivan to immediately drop the charges against Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj. The charges—assault and interfering with police—stemmed from her attempt to de-escalate an ICE raid on May 8, 2025—an obvious retaliatory prosecution for her criticism of the Worcester Police Department.

“Come Out Ye Cowards ICE” (Intro: 00:00; Song: 00:52) Original song: “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” by Dominic Behan (1960s) Adaptation by Carsie Blanton Additional verses by Sophie Schleicher Further adaptation and performance by Ben Grosscup.

Lyric Sheet for Songs to Abolish ICE: https://bit.ly/Songs2AbolishICE

https://linktr.ee/BenGrosscup #abolishice #reneegood #alexpretti #protestmusic #courage #comeoutyeblackandtans #minneapolisresistance #DominicBehan #CarsieBlanton #PhilOchs #EtelHaxhiaj

More info on Ben Grosscup’s music: https://linktr.ee/BenGrosscup

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Please join me on Wings of Change. It’s only the beginning as we still have so much work to continue to do as many activists and organizations address current threats to our democracy and unjust actions against people of color and activists and make plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

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“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people,
can transform the world.”
— Howard Zinn

January 26, 2026
Chris Hedges: The Machinery of Terror

Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless.

The Missing Link – by Mr. Fish

Chris Hedges: The Machinery of Terror

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost / January 12, 2026

I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.

I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.

Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.

Terror works.

The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the Jan. 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.

ICE, our Americanized Gestapo, is being birthed.

Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organizing to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence. It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.

If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.

Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent.

The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation.”

Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.

The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.

“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings. So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.

The authoritarian state cannibalizes the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.

There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a visa.

Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.

Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.

ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants. It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.

ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.

ICE agents, intoxicated by the license to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.

None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.

Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.

Césaire writes:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”

Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.

Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone<

Editor’s Note: In Minneapolia on Saturday, January 10, 2026 50,000 people marched west Lake St. to 34th St. and Portland Avenue where Renee Good was murdered by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross, who as Chris Hedges has shared with us was a machinegunner in Iraq. Minneapolis is a city under seige as thousands of ICE agents attack not only the Twin Cities but all over the state. Many cities in the US also held large demonstrations in support of Minnesota and against ICE’s reign of terror. Chris is appealing to those who have not yet joined us in resistance. Does it take a murder to activate us? Certainly it raises awareness, and brings close to home for us in Minnesota what has been happening in other cities and states although there was certainly solidarity with those cities before Minnesota was targeted. The murder of a white middle class woman strikes close to a metaphorical home for many of us. As always, I wonder with Trump how one man, along with those supporting him, can be so filled with hate. What a sad way to live and to use up their lives.

In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we’re doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation to ScheerPost, Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

Author Site

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In this critical time hearing voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support WingsofChange.me as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media Access is always free, but if you would like to help:
A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others.

Sue Ann Martinson, Editor

January 16, 2026
The Cancer Plague: Nuclear Power and Waste, by Susu Jeffrey

The Cancer Plague: Nuclear Power and Waste / Original to Wings of Change
By Susu Jeffrey / August 18, 2025

“Sometimes before I give a speech, I ask the audience to stand up if they or someone in their family has had cancer,” says John LaForge of Nukewatch. “Eighty percent of the audience gets up.”

The Monticello nuclear power reactor is on the Mississippi River about 35-miles northwest of Minneapolis. Xcel’s twin Prairie Island reactors, plus about 50 giant dry casks storing waste reactor fuel, are all in the floodplain of the Mississippi. This waste is sited 44 to 51 miles southeast of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There are no plans to move the waste off-island because there is no alternative destination. In fact, 34 more concrete encased steel casks are planned. There is no national hot radioactive waste repository. Think of these waste container sites as permanent radioactive waste dumps.

The greater Twin Cities’ 3.7 million people are in the nuclear “shadow” (within 50 miles) of all three nukes. The Mississippi River serves 20 million people with drinking water, way beyond the Minnesota state population of 5.7 million. Minnesota’s aging nukes are a national threat. For approximately the next six generations, radioactive tritium will be a part of the drinking water wherever those molecules wander.

The Monticello nuke was licensed in 1970 for 40 years, and went online in 1971, a year it had two radioactive cesium spills. In 2010, the license was renewed for another 20 years until 2030. Xcel Energy has even been granted an extension for another 20 years until 2050. It is a corporate financial security move not yet approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission which holds the final consent. Paperwork is one thing, pipes are another.

In November 2022, a 50-year-old underground pipe leaked 829,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated wastewater that reached the Mississippi River, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Xcel failed to make public the radioactive spill for four months. After a May 15, 2024 public hearing in Monticello where citizens testified “We don’t trust you. You lie,” an NRC executive “clarified” Xcel’s “miscommunication.”

Senior Environmental Project Manager, Stephen J. Koenick admitted some tritium had been measured in the Mississippi. Tritium bonds with water and cannot be separated out. Water obeys gravity running downhill, in the case of Monticello, from the reactor to the Mississippi. The runaway tritium will persist in the environment for ten half-lives or about 123 years.

The trumpeter swan gets its name from its loud sonorous call — and the spot on the Mississippi River near the Monticello nuclear power plant is often filled with them in winter. Tim Post | MPR News file*

No telling where Xcel’s radioactive molecules will land. Men have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes; for women the chance is one in three (National Cancer Institute, 2/9/2022). There is tremendous popular, fear-driven support for the oncology industry.

The good news is that while cancer numbers are up so is the cancer survival rate. However, at nuke weapons, nuke reactors, and the virtually forever waste sites, “accidents” happen along with on-going radioactive decay. Radioactivity cannot be contained. When I was a newspaper reporter in Brevard County, Florida, where Cape Canaveral is located, I learned that nuclear waste cannot be rocketed off into space because it’s too hot, too heavy, and the rockets too faulty.

Nuclear Safety Regulations Changing

Among Pres. Trump’s cost-cutting moves is a weakening of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s exposure standards. Staff would be cut and regulations “revised” virtually cutting off the commission’s independent status. The Monticello nuke was licensed for 40 years and was rubber stamped to work for 80. Octogenarian nukes are considered “safe enough” now by the nuclear/government consortium.

Piecemeal fix-it parts for geriatric machinery or people are a lucrative business. Locating a leaking tritium pipe underground, between buildings, removing and replacing it is a non-negotiable emergency at nuclear reactors with miles and miles of piping. Upkeep expenses figure in utility rate hikes.

Joseph Mangano and Ernest Sternglass did a study of eight downwind U.S. communities in the two years after a nuclear reactor closure. A remarkable 17.4 percent drop in infant mortality was found. “We finally have peer-reviewed accurate data attaching nuclear power reactors to death and injury in the host communities,” New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky said of the 2002 report in the Archives of Environmental Health.

Monopoly capitalism or public service?

Clearly the Monticello reactor was designed to make money. In November 2024, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison wrote that Xcel has “aggressively” pursued multi-year rate hikes while earning large profits. In 2024 Xcel reported $1.94-billion net earnings, a profit margin up 14% from 2023.

According to Xcel propaganda, the nuke is “the biggest employer and largest local taxpayer” in Monticello, MN, and generates an estimated $550 million in economic activity each year in the region. And like profits, cancer rates are up notably among people under 50 and rising faster among women than men the American Cancer Society reports.

Repeatedly, the Xcel corporation wins its rate hike and re-licensing “asks.” These asks get rewritten and resubmitted until a “compromise” is reached. In 2025, residential customers will pay $5.39 more per month, down from the original ask of $9.89, according to Minnesota Public Radio, which also noted that greater increases are on the horizon for EVs and data center capital improvements.

Cancer

St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital advertises heavily with videos of big-eyed, bald children cancer patients. In a review of published studies of 136 nuclear reactor sites in the European Journal of Cancer Care in 2007, elevated leukemia disease rates in children were documented in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Canada. This is not a new story.

The danger of mental retardation of fetuses exposed in the womb was reported in The New York Times (page A1 on 12/20/1989). Tritium crosses the placenta. In addition to the health costs of breathing and ingesting exhausts from nuclear power reactors, there is the problem of what to do with and how to contain its long-lived waste. The nuclear profit god is a once and future terrorist.

Please sign now: A petition calling for the closure of the Monticello nuclear reactor! Here is the link:

https://chng.it/bY8KBrYKyZ

* The Trumpeter Swans have been a tourist attraction at the Monticello nuclear reactor plant in the past. With the discovering of the tritium poison leak they can no longer gather in the poisoned water.

Susu Jeffrey is a poet and writer living in Minneapolis. She has opposed nuclear weapons/nuclear power since before her arrest at Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977.

In this critical time in our country hearing the voices of truth and engaging in honest discussion for critical issues is all the more important while censorship (and outright lies) along with attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support the WingsofChange.me website and Rise Up Times on social media as we to bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media. Access is alway free, but if you would like to help:
Whatever you are able donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions.

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August 22, 2025