Politics

Sometimes it can't be avoided.

Mark and Melissa Hortman (Patrick Haluptzok/GoFundMe)

I usually avoid writing about politics. Frankly, I think there’s too much politics in our lives — it has, for many Americans, supplanted religion as their primary identifier. But sometimes politics cannot be avoided. So, while not partisan, this post will be political.

I woke up Sunday morning, stunned and sick to my stomach at what was developing just miles from me: the political assassination of the Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman, and her husband and dog, and the attempted assassination of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. We have since discovered that the murderer visited at least two other Democratic elected officials that night, surveilled many others, and had a notebook with over 45 persons on his hit list.

Minnesota is a small place, relatively speaking, especially for those of us who’ve spent our whole lives here. The killer came from the same small town as my father, and he was arrested not far from a baseball field at which I regularly umpire games. His wife was picked up, ostensibly fleeing the country, at a gas station at which I sometimes stop on the way to the cabin.

And the Hortmans — well, that hits close to home. While I did not know them, I have several friends who did. They were about my age, with kids about the ages of my kids. In another world, I would have run for office — my mother and both of my grandfathers held elective office in Minnesota (the lies about me on the internet have precluded that path for me). The point being, the Hortmans’ murders have affected me in a way that most violence does not.