Tag: Truthout

  • The Love We See in Minneapolis Isn’t Exceptional — It’s How We Survive Together

    The Love We See in Minneapolis Isn’t Exceptional — It’s How We Survive Together

    Acts of Service and Mutual Aid Sustain Minneapolis as It Remains Under Assault


    The Love We See in Minneapolis Isn’t Exceptional — It’s How We Survive Together

    By Susan Raffo for Truthout / ScheerPost / February 15, 2026

    My partner, an immigrant from Brazil, shows love through acts of service. At first, I was confused. I had been raised to see romantic love, partner love, as centered on acts of adoration, big and intense actions designed to make me, the beloved, feel exceptional. My partner, who is romantic but not in that way, finds this focus on exceptional love confusing. She bonds with other immigrants on the strangeness of the adoration economy, sharing stories of childhoods where love was pragmatic, not gilded. My feminist self took an embarrassingly long time to feel the depth of love embedded in my partner doing my laundry or putting together a new shelf for my office. I grew up with the acts-of-service kind of love but my family didn’t describe it as love. It was about duty. And survival.
    I think about all of this, sitting in my Minneapolis home, reading essay after essay about the mutual aid and collective care that is everywhere on these streets. Some of the reporting is laced with the tinsel of adoration: Minneapolis is exceptional! Better than anyone! No one else is like this!!! I want to reach out and grab the authors by the pen and say, Hey, that isn’t what this is. Please don’t exceptionalize us. This is a steadiness of love as caring for your neighbor, love as meeting the material needs of someone nearby. There is nothing new or fancy or romantic about it. It’s just love. Junauda Petrus, poet laureate of Minneapolis, said it beautifully — and off-handedly — to me during a recent phone call:

    “What people are vibing off of right now is getting to know each other, spending time together. For a lot of folks, this isn’t how they were raised. Or they were raised like this and they forgot. They have forgotten how to meet each other, to just spend time with each other — not as people who agree on everything but as people who are just part of the same thing. In the [Twin] Cities, we’re building a technology of togetherness.”

    In writing this piece, I thought about what would help people in my communities to feel seen and what might help those living elsewhere to have clear examples of what we are doing here. I called a range of beloveds, all of them doing so much, and some of them unable to leave their homes and benefiting from the care being spread around, and asked them this: Would me interviewing you for an essay be nourishing or would it feel like another thing you have to cross off your list? And some people said, “Ouch, not this week,” or “No, we are being targeted too much and it feels scary,” or “I love you, Susan, but god, I am tired.” And they said things like, “If you need it, I will make it happen,” and I got to say back to them, “No, beloved, it’s ok. I got you. You got me. That’s how it works.”

    Acts of Service and Mutual Aid Sustain Minneapolis as It Remains Under Assault

    Not everything happening in Minneapolis is new. All of this care builds on the relationships already in place. My friend Hannah (who is using a pseudonym to protect her mutual aid network) said that even before “Operation Metro Surge,” some parents were already taking turns bringing children to school and having conversations with teachers and school staff about school safety.

    “In October, when things started to get scary, we — the parents at our kid’s school — set up a Google Voice number and email and got the school admin to informally connect us with parents who needed help with rides for their children and groceries,” Hannah said. “It started small and then it grew. Now there are 88 families, or 106 students — a fifth of the school population — that we are supporting. About 40 of those kids, the ones still attending school in person, get rides to and from school from 30 different drivers made up of parents and neighbors and grandparents…. We have patrols who watch drop-in time, end of day pick-up, recess, and special events, and they call an alert when ICE is spotted nearby, which happens too often.”

    And the community isn’t just coming together around school and student safety.

    “We have set up grocery and food shelf deliveries. We have someone helping with Delegation of Parental Authority forms for just in case a parent is kidnapped and their child is left behind. We also have a lawyer who can file habeas petitions. There are seniors at a nearby assisted living facility who do the laundry for those sheltering in their homes,” Hannah said. “There are rent funds and funds for bills that sometimes include paying for bonds and legal fees. We have a doctor who can do medical house calls and we are connected with a group of vets who can help people with their pets.”

    Violet (who is using a pseudonym to protect herself) is a nurse who mostly works with prenatal and postnatal patients through a community clinic. She said that the old lines that defined professionalism have shifted dramatically: “I had never called people from my personal cell phone before. I had never been to their houses. I’m not supposed to work outside of the clinic.” She is part of the vast network of health care workers finding ways to shift their systems so that institutional care is more accessible, and showing up outside of that institutional care to make sure patients have what they need.

    “My adult daughter has been helping, packaging up food and driving with me for deliveries. This means she sees patient names and addresses — all of the things we aren’t supposed to do,” Violet said.

    “I know there’s professional risk here, but every person I know cares more about making sure that we are doing this in a way that keeps our neighbors safe. That is why we are here. Every other risk just seems so inconsequential.”

    I talked with another dear one about the relationship between patrols and neighborhood care, how they are overlapping circles that each inform the other. Jamie Schwesnedl from Moon Palace Books talks about how these acts of service are woven together in a lot of families. In his case, he explained that he takes on rapid response and patrol duties while his partner delivers groceries and other supplies that have been delivered to Moon Palace, a neighborhood site for supply drop-off.

    And still, he reflects, the lines between rapid response and mutual aid are blurrier than you would think:

    “My partner is able to receive deliveries like groceries and diapers at the bookstore and then be available for people who come to do pick-up, checking their names against the spreadsheets and ensuring that everyone is who they say they are. Our front counter has become a free zone for whistles, signs, and flyers, and people coming to get groceries to deliver also pick up whistles. When I am on patrol, I drop things off between places, change light bulbs, or carry boxes, or plunge toilets, or pick up things people have dropped off to bring to a patrol meeting or some other form of neighborhood organizing. I don’t deliver anything for those sheltering in place during this time, but there are deliveries needed to support the people on patrol who are facing down ICE. Any time I leave home, I have an eyewash water bottle for pepper spray, bullhorns, and snacks and hand warmers.”

    “Different families,” he said, “split up acts of service in different ways and everyone is careful to protect those targeted by ICE.”

    This Love Isn’t Exceptional — It’s Just Love

    It is a dangerous idea that any one person has to carry everything on their shoulders. We take turns. A teacher of mine once said to me: Never underestimate who might be willing to show up when things are tough. Who we are in moments of crisis and struggle is not always the same as who we are in easier times.

    And people around us are not always who we think they are. Ojibwe writer Marcie Rendon told me the story of one of her neighbors, a person who flies the American flag and has red, white, and blue bunting on their house all year round. Somewhat reclusive, everyone assumed that this older white man was a right-leaning person, but really, she said, he’s just someone from rural Minnesota who loves his country, loves the flag, and hates what is happening. He came to one of the block meetings and people were surprised. Now he is just one of the many showing up in the neighborhood.

    Everyone I interviewed for this piece, and the six people who said “no,” and the 15 people whose names I wrote down but then didn’t reach out to because I ran out of time, is beloved to me. Intimate and known. And there are so many more — people I will never meet and who are more than two degrees removed from the hundreds I do know and they are protecting their communities as well.

    When I look away from my to-do lists and Signal threads and worries about those I know and those I don’t, when I take a moment to exhale, I keep seeing this beautiful web being woven in Minnesota: not with new materials but with wisdom that was already here. When I stop, I can feel this net with my hands, this connection when I am on patrol and we pass that group of three on the corner of Cedar and Lake, this connection as I see someone who I know pull boxes of baby formula out of their trunk, look left and right, and then head over to a drop-off point.

    This is not romantic love, not some kind of exceptionalism that wants to put everything in bright lights and roses. No, we are all the same people as we were last year. Some folks need to be the main character of every story, white saviorism is real, Black beloveds have to watch as those who did not show up in these kinds of numbers when George Floyd was murdered show up now, and each of these little pods of neighbors organizing legal aid and groceries do not always have access to their best selves. We are real people in real time, and these are acts of service and they are a form of love, but it is not exceptional love. It is just love.

    I remember this very old fishing net someone showed me years ago, guiding my fingers to feel where the net had been repaired over and over again, like scars in the fibers that strengthen rather than break. ICE is sharp like knives, nicking and sometimes shoving and tearing through this connected set of scars and fresh material. There are wounds, this is violence, and some of you are being stopped on the road because of how you are perceived and I am not being stopped and none of this is ever okay… and still, I feel the pull and tug of a net that is larger than anything I have experienced before. Is there anyone in these cities not showing up in some way? I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone with words other than: How can I help?

    There is a net and it has always been here, it is always here. This is not exceptional. There is nothing new here. All that is happening in Minnesota is that some of the confusion is fading and what is visible is the link and weave and stumble and steady between us. May we keep repairing it as it frays, from those outside and from the rising tension we hold within, and may this net grow with wisdom and may bodies tired of holding themselves up alone someday feel like they can relax into the steady certainty of something much bigger than the size of their skin.

    This love is not exceptional. It is the acts-of-service kind of love. The kind of love that says to your neighbor: Let us take care of each other. I am going to remember you. It’s the kind of love that says: This, this is how we survive. Together.

    Susan Raffo is a writer and bodyworker living in Mni sóta Makoce, Minneapolis. You can find out about her work at www.susanraffo.com.

    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 Wings of Change

    “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

  • The Political Blowback to GOP’s Medicaid Cuts Has Already Begun

    The Political Blowback to GOP’s Medicaid Cuts Has Already Begun

    “Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities.”

    Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, told Truthout that since Trump took office in January, $1.5 billion has been cut in assistance to food banks and pantries.

    Lin says that the combination of camaraderie and affordability will keep her coming back to the center for as long as she’s physically able. “My income — a $1,400 Social Security check and a pension of slightly more than $300 a month — doesn’t leave much left over. My rent is $1,000 and I have to pay for utilities and a phone,” she says. “So many of us seniors live doubled-up or in substandard housing. We deserve better, but the government, and Donald Trump in particular, treat us like garbage.”

    Low-income seniors and their advocates agree and say that pending cuts to food and nutrition programs — including funding for meals at senior centers, and cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Meals on Wheels —will increase hunger and malnutrition.

    Both are already big problems.

    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. If you would like to help click here.

    According to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantries, food insecurity is nothing new, and even before Trump’s Big Bad Bill championed slashing social welfare spending, 6.9 million people over the age of 65 faced hunger in the U.S. The group estimates that in 2022, one in 11 people aged 60 and older, and one in eight between the ages of 50 and 59, lacked adequate food.

    Part of the reason is poverty, but isolation, the inability to shop or cook, trouble chewing and swallowing, cognitive decline, depression, a diminished sense of smell and/or taste, and the side effects of medication can also contribute to malnutrition in American seniors. These factors, in concert with economic precarity, make it difficult for many elders to remain healthy and well-nourished.

    But money, unsurprisingly, is crucial to eating well, and many seniors like Elisabeth and Lin have too little of it.

    According to the Social Security Administration, as of May 2025, the average monthly Social Security payment was $2,002. Millions, however, are ineligible for retirement benefits and instead rely on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a benefit provided to disabled people who did not work for the required 40 quarters needed to collect Social Security. Their monthly benefits amount to $967 for individuals and $1,450 for couples. More than 2 million adults over 65 receive SSI, with 39 percent living below the poverty line.

    “Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities.”

    Pre-Trump, even the federal government recognized the toll of poverty on older people’s quality of life. A July 2024 report issued by the National Institute on Aging, a department of the National Institutes of Health, noted that over the past two decades, “food insecurity among families that include adults over the age of 60 had almost doubled, affecting nearly 25 percent of such families.” The report further acknowledged that hunger and lack of access to nutritious food has had a disproportionate impact on Black, Brown and Indigenous households.

    And it’s likely to get much worse.

    Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, told Truthout that since Trump took office in January, $1.5 billion has been cut in assistance to food banks and pantries, including a $130 million administrative cut to the 43-year-old Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency food and shelter program.

    “They are working to make the ‘Golden Years’ the ‘Hungry Years,’” he said. “Seniors used to be the third rail of American politics, but that rule is no longer sacrosanct. I think that Congressmembers who support these cuts are following their leader off a cliff. They apparently want seniors, children, and veterans to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”

    Markell Lewis Miller has seen the impact of these cuts directly. As the director of community food programs at Food Gatherers, a food bank in Washtenaw County, Michigan, she oversaw the distribution of 9.9 million pounds of food to hungry Michiganders in 2024, many of them seniors.

    But two months into the Trump administration, the organization’s food supply took a tremendous hit.

    “The U.S. Department of Agriculture is one of the largest sources of food for us, through the emergency food assistance program,” Miller told Truthout. “In March of this year, there was an administrative action, and with no warning whatsoever, we experienced a cut, by half, of what we used to get through the [emergency food assistance] program. This amounts to 15 percent of the food we give out annually. Short-term, we’ve used our reserve funds and fundraised to generate money to purchase food to replace what was lost.”

    The impact, she says, has been severe. According to Miller, prior to the cut, Food Gatherers spent approximately $4 million a year purchasing food. Replacing lost items from the Department of Agriculture, she says, will require them to spend an additional $2.5 million, money that will have to be raised through philanthropic and individual donations.

    Other issues also have staff worried. “Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities,” Miller says. “Grocery stores will see their sales plummet and some will close; people will also see their health decline if they lose access to fresh, affordable, and nutritious food, which can lead to malnutrition.” The cascading impact, she adds, can lead to calcium and vitamin deficiencies, as well as health issues such as depression, cognitive disorders, slower wound healing, loss of muscle mass, and frailty syndrome.

    “Every dollar matters to people on fixed incomes,” she says.

    What’s more, Miller and her colleagues worry that the imposition of work requirements on older SNAP recipients will further restrict access to healthy meals.

    Cutting the SNAP Rolls by Making People Ineligible
    for Benefits

    Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director of SNAP programs at the Food Research & Action Center, sees the proposed work requirements — a mandate that SNAP recipients work a minimum of 80 hours a month until they reach age 64 — as a way to thin the rolls. “Failure to secure work will mean that people can only receive SNAP for three months in a three-year period,” she told Truthout. “But this requirement does not come with a job offer or transportation to and from a job. People who live in areas, particularly rural areas, where few jobs exist, or who are grandparents doing unpaid (but essential) child care, will not be exempted. Raising the threshold from age 54 does not take these realities into account.”

    “Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have not created the infrastructure to support them.”

    Other changes to SNAP will also have a deleterious impact, Plata-Nino says. “Previously, if you had a child under 18 in the household, you were exempted from the work rules. Now, the House version of the bill exempts only those people with a child under 7. They also want to exclude the cost of internet service when calculating SNAP eligibility. People with kids in school and folks with disabilities will be particularly harmed by getting rid of this deduction since they have to have the internet in their homes to function.”

    Plata-Nino sounds furious as she speaks. “These changes are meant to give a tax cut to the top 1 percent,” she says. “For seniors who worked incredibly hard their whole lives, finding a part-time job is often impossible, and if they fail, they’ll lose their access to food. It’s cruel. In addition, many seniors own their own homes, but they’re still financially stressed because their property taxes have not stopped. Their fuel and utility costs have not stopped. Boilers break, and with climate change, people need air conditioners as well as heat. We know time limits on eligibility do not increase employment. But they do keep people off the program and scrambling to eat.”

    Meals on Wheels Faces Cutbacks

    Meals on Wheels, a national food delivery service (and congregate meal provider in some locales) has filled nutritional gaps for more than 70 years. Like SNAP, it is also on the chopping block.

    Josh Protas, the group’s chief advocacy and policy officer, told Truthout that about 37 percent of funding for the 5,000 local Meals on Wheels programs that exist nationwide comes through the federal Older Americans Act.

    “About 90 percent of our programs get federal money, and many get half or more of their funding from federal social service block grants, community development block grants, or other federal funding streams, some of which are now threatened,” he says. “In some states, Medicaid has allowed special medically tailored meals to be reimbursed for people in renal failure or with heart conditions. In other places, SNAP can be used to make voluntary contributions to offset the cost of meals. We don’t know if these specialized programs will survive.”

    All told, he says, Meals on Wheels provides food to about 2.2 million older adults annually. But this barely scratches the surface of need. “There are many older adults we’re not reaching,” Protas says. “We estimate that at least 2.5 million low-income seniors are eligible for Meals on Wheels but are not served. One in three of our programs has a waiting list with waits ranging from a few months to years.”

    To tell an adult who is unable to leave their home that they have to wait is painful, he adds, “but it’s even worse when an opening comes up and we discover that the person died while waiting.”

    In addition to providing food, Protas reports that Meals on Wheels provides a secondary function: assessing the meal recipient’s living situation and providing a few minutes of conversation and social engagement each day.

    “Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have not created the infrastructure to support them,” he says. “The needs of older adults do not get prioritized. Money from the federal government has always helped unlock philanthropic dollars, but the truth is that less than 1 percent of foundation grants go to seniors. People gravitate to causes benefiting kids and animals; older adults get second-tier consideration. Even more concerning, one of the fastest-growing unhoused populations is older people, folks who did what they could to earn a living and who still end up on the streets with nothing.”

    Cuts, he concludes, will exacerbate this shameful legacy.

    But seniors, disabled adults, and their advocates are fighting back. Led by the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations and the Coalition on Human Needs, they are making their opposition to SNAP cuts, Medicaid cuts, and Medicare cuts loud and clear, as well as urging for support for national programs like Meals on Wheels and local food banks like Food Gatherers. In addition, an unprecedented coalition of state attorneys general, led by Washington, D.C.’s Karl A. Racine and New York’s Letitia James, have sued the administration to stop the SNAP cuts from taking effect.

    “Many older Americans rely on Medicaid and if they slash it, people will have less money to pay for food and medicine,” Joel Berg of Hunger Free America predicts. “Imagine being 63. You’ve worked in a steel plant for 20 years. The plant closes and, because of age discrimination, you can’t find another job. You will lose your SNAP benefits after three months and won’t be eligible again for three years unless you find a 20-hour-a-week job. Seniors are being attacked from land, sea, and air, and these cuts are happening on top of significant cuts that have been imposed over the last few years. People are increasingly going hungry. The nonprofit sector is a bit shell-shocked, but people are pushing back and coalescing with farmers and the food industry to pressure lawmakers.”

    Note: A correction has been made to fix a typo in Gina Plata-Nino’s name.