We Can’t Talk About Minneapolis Because We’ve Lost the Ability to Talk at All

In the wake of what happened in Minneapolis, the country has once again split into familiar camps. On one side: official statements, carefully worded and contradicted by video and eyewitness accounts. On the other: calls for a nationwide general strike on January 30 — a mass withdrawal meant to signal moral urgency and collective power.

 

The impulse is understandable. People are angry. They feel lied to. They feel unheard. They feel exhausted by a system that continues to fail them.

 

But the moment also exposes something deeper about our political culture: we’ve reduced participation to a false binary.

 

You either perform outrage — loudly, visibly, and often superficially — or you disengage entirely. You post or you tune out. You amplify or you retreat. And if you refuse both options, you risk being accused of apathy, complicity, or cowardice.

 

What’s missing is the space in between: dialogue that is neither performative nor passive, neither conciliatory nor nihilistic. Dialogue that doesn’t equivocate — but does insist on rigor.

 

Right now, much of our political energy is being spent on theater. Official narratives are delivered with certainty even when the facts say otherwise. Social media fills the gaps with emotionally satisfying stories that travel faster than verification ever could. AI-generated videos circulate as proof. Speculation becomes conviction. Conviction becomes identity.

 

The result is not accountability. It’s entrenchment.

 

And when that happens, even legitimate demands — transparency, oversight, reform — lose their force. Because they’re no longer grounded in shared reality, but in competing performances of righteousness.

 

This is the trap we keep falling into.

 

The call for a general strike captures that tension perfectly. For some, it represents moral clarity: a refusal to participate in systems that perpetuate harm. For others, it feels disconnected from strategy, unclear in its demands, or untethered from any mechanism for enforcement or negotiation. The debate quickly collapses into accusation: you’re either “doing something” or you’re enabling injustice.

 

But history tells a different story.

 

Every successful movement — labor, civil rights, anti-war, prison abolition — combined pressure with precision. Action with articulation. Disruption with demands that could be understood, debated, and enforced. They didn’t rely on vibes or viral momentum alone. They built power through sustained dialogue and strategic clarity.

 

That kind of work is slower. Less gratifying. Harder to brand.

 

It also happens to be the only thing that works.

 

Real change comes from the unglamorous work of reckoning: establishing what actually happened, acknowledging institutional failures, and being willing to sit in the discomfort of complexity.

 

Minneapolis could have been a moment for that kind of reckoning. A moment to ask why federal agents operate with such opacity. Why local officials are often shut out of investigations that affect their own communities. Why accountability mechanisms are so easily sidelined in the name of “security.”

 

Reaching outside of the familiar binaries for answers is hard but, I would argue, more sustainable.

 

It’s building spaces for conversation that are not governed by entrenched in political ideology, that occur outside the echo chamber of our algorithmic social media platforms. It’s insisting on evidence even when it complicates our narratives. And it’s understanding that real change rarely arrives through spectacle — it arrives through focused, stubborn engagement that forces institutions to respond.

 

Dialogue, in this sense, is not a substitute for action. It’s the precondition for meaningful action.

 

Not dialogue that equivocates. Not dialogue that seeks consensus at any cost. But dialogue that is rigorous, grounded, and willing to hold contradiction without collapsing into cynicism or tribalism.

 

That is the gray area.

 

And in a moment when politics is increasingly designed to keep us locked in permanent opposition, the gray may be the only place left where something honest — and something lasting — can still be built.