Collage, digital color print, 13 x 19 inches
Collage, digital color print, 13 x 19 inches
Collage, digital color print, 13 x 19 inches
Fantabulosas 25 January 2026 (Minnesota Nice)
The sky was low and gray, the kind of day that makes you feel every step you take. People I talked to didn’t come down there looking for trouble — they came because they didn’t want to believe what was happening in their own city. They watched the videos again and again, the ones that show Pretti with a phone, not a weapon, trying to help someone a federal agent had shoved down, only to be tackled and shot in the back while agents stood over him.
“Minnesota nice” is what folks used to joke about — a way of being that dates back generations, where folks hold doors and say please and thank you. But today, they say it like a warning: nice doesn’t cut it when authorities kill your neighbor while lying about it. Parents and neighbors tell the same stories: nurse, outdoorsman, someone who walked dogs and fixed bikes and helped people.
Witnesses filed sworn statements saying they saw none of the official story — no man with a gun, no threat — just a man trying to protect another. One said he feared going home — that federal agents might come looking for her.
And while politicians trade blame and officials call it self‑defense, the people on the street are doing something else: holding candlelight vigils in sub‑zero cold, blocking intersections, chanting “No more Minnesota nice.” One young voice in the crowd said it straight: “We make the world run. We can make it stop.”
That’s the sound of a community no longer willing to do nice, to wait politely for explanation or justice. What people are saying now isn’t academic — it’s a raw reckoning, born of watching one of their own fall under bullets while the powers above deny what the cameras plainly show.