![]() But like me, they witnessed what was happening. As far as I could tell, they were among the majority who didn’t do any damage. The young man and his friend both told me they were from Grand Rapids, born and raised. This was past midnight, when fires were already burning, windows had already been smashed. “We down here, but we’re doing it for a good cause,” one young person told me Saturday night, “Everybody keep it peaceful, just keep it peaceful.” We are the people who came out in the light on a Sunday morning to clean it up.īut I was there. We are not the people who came out in darkness to destroy a city. As if any one of them can be held fully responsible for what happened. It came from anarchists.Īs if each of those groups don’t exist in our community. ![]() This destruction came from white supremacists. As if it wasn’t part of the larger anger, senselessness and destruction happening all over the country. As if the anger, the senselessness and the destruction wasn’t ours. We’re rewriting the story of that night to make sense of that night, to tell ourselves we’re better than this. “Who we are is what we all experienced this morning as hundreds and hundreds of people came out to restore our city.” “This does not represent who we are,” the mayor said during a daylight press conference following the night of mayhem in Grand Rapids. Look at the person in this photo smashing a window. I felt the warmth from a fire as it swallowed a police vehicle on a quiet intersection.Īnd I’ve listened in the days since, as the people of my city have tried to rationalize away what happened that night, as if it wasn’t us who did it. I heard the sound of glass shattering, of people cheering. I walked the streets of my city on the night of mayhem Saturday, and witnessed the destruction. The full meeting is available online here. The mayor and city commissioners decided not to extend the city's 7 p.m. Update: The Grand Rapids City Commission met Tuesday and discussed the events of Saturday night.
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