I’m 72 years old. I have tried to live a life that is examined: to be disciplined about making the world a better place. I am non-violent. I have never been in fistfight in my life. I have been accused of being verbally abusive and I take that seriously. I have changed how I interact with people, especially women. In the early women’s liberation movement, I and other verbose men were accused of not letting women speak enough. People didn’t call it mansplaining then, but that’s what it was. I have tried to listen to those criticisms and be as non-violent as I can. I think being a white, male, heterosexual person in America is a kind of violence you have to fight against.
— David Tilsen
Family Stories: Great-Grandmother Marian Le Sueur
I grew up immersed in family stories that shaped me. One of those stories was about my great-grandmother, Marian Le Sueur, a wife who was not allowed to read or get a library card, open a bank account, or be the free person she wanted to be. She wrapped up her three children and fled her husband, leaving San Antonio, Texas, in the dark of night, to her mother’s home in Oklahoma. That story has been told and retold. Meridel Le Sueur tells it in her biography of her parents, The Crusaders.
Marian then became involved in Chautauqua circles, met renowned socialists Eugene Debs and Helen Keller, and became a great orator. She met Arthur Le Sueur the socialist lawyer, and the two of them, along with Eugene Debs, opened the People’s College. Marian was committed to literacy for working people. Eventually the college was closed down because of its opposition to World War I. It was burned to the ground and people were tarred and feathered.
Arthur and Marian Le Sueur Bring Their Politics to the Upper-Midwest
Arthur and Marian moved their family to Minot, North Dakota, and Arthur became the Socialist Party Mayor of Minot. One year he ran for Vice President with Eugene Debs. Eventually Marian and Arthur became early activists of the Farmer Labor Party, whose commonwealth vision fit with their non-Marxist socialism.
They moved to Minneapolis in the 1920s. Arthur was on the Minneapolis School Board in 1934 and later was appointed Judge by Governor Benson. Marian was appointed to the Board of Education. When the Governor nominated her for Commissioner of Education, the Senate refused to confirm her because of her radicalism and her opposition to World War I. That didn’t happen again until the current Senate refused to confirm some of Walz’s appointments.
Grandmother Meridel Le Sueur
Marian and Arthur died when I was young. My grandmother, Marian’s daughter Meridel, studied how to write and talk about people’s struggles. On and off during her lifetime, she was able to earn a living from her writing. She continued to write regardless, expressing the situation of working women and men. Her novel The Girl is one the top 20 American novels IMHO, up there with Moby Dick and Grapes of Wrath.
Meridel taught me the importance of listening, writing, and capturing what was going on around me, without being separate from it. She considered herself a reporter, but the kind of reporter who was part of the event. A great example of that work is her writing about the 1934 Minneapolis Trucker’s Strike. She was involved as a woman, cooking the food, serving the coffee. I tried to do that when George Floyd was murdered, writing about it as someone who lived in South Minneapolis, about the burning of the Third Precinct, a building, whose residents had done so much evil in our name. I felt, at the time, that it was righteous. I’m sure that will come back to haunt me.
Mother/Activist Rachel Tilsen
My mother, Rachel Tilsen, was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. She was dedicated to being a good mother, activist, and citizen throughout the 1950s, opposing the Cold War and McCarthyism. She was a leader in the committee to keep the Rosenbergs from being executed. She and her friends talked about motherhood and marriage in ways that Betty Friedan would a decade later. I have those letters and they are marvelous.
WILPF and Radioactive Iodine in Milk
Mrs. Tilsen was considered “out there” by my friends’ parents, neighbors, and people she knew from Temple. For years we didn’t drink fresh milk. My mother was part of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and she learned and taught us about the half-life of radioactive iodine which was emitted by atomic testing. It fell on the grass and the cows ate it. She did the math and figured that milk was only safe when it was 90 days old. So we bought powdered milk and kept the box for three months before using. When I went to school and they taught us about isotopes, I already knew and I thought everyone knew. In my family it was like learning how to look both ways before crossing the street.
All of our baby teeth, and the baby teeth of the children of other WILPF members were sent to a lab in Dayton, Ohio, ground up, and analyzed for isotopes, so she knew from this research that milk in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota was particularly vulnerable because of the wind patterns. In the 1960s, when a Senator from Iowa got thyroid cancer, he had hearings and it came to light that children who drank milk in the Midwest in the 1950s ended up with thyroid cancer. My friends who came to my house thought mom was nuts, but she was right.
Rachel Tilsen, Feminist in the 1950s
My grandfather, Edward Tilsen, along with his brothers constructed Tilsenbilt Homes for working class people. Edward bought a farm and built houses on it, creating the nucleus of Mendota Heights. The first house was for his lawyer son. My father grew up in the Selby Dale neighborhood and he wanted to stay there, but he could not refuse this home his father built for him. It was a beautiful house. When we moved out there it was farmland. Cows wandered around in our yard. The suburb developed around us.
My grandfather built a model home to show to house buyers that was not far from us. One day when he was doing a photo shoot for Better Homes and Gardens, my mother taught her five kids a profound lesson. It was hot. We didn’t have air conditioning. All of us kids were running around playing, sweating, making a mess. The magazine came over and asked, “Mrs. Tilsen, could we use your kitchen to brown a ham.” She said “Sure.”
When she came back from checking out the shoot, she gathered all five of us kids together and told us, “They have two air-conditioned trailers for actors playing mom, dad, and kids. The actress mom is getting her hair and nails done. She will be serving the ham to her model family, in an immaculate kitchen. Women all over the country are going to see this and feel inadequate because they and their children and their kitchen don’t look perfect. Don’t you ever feel that way. Remember, they couldn’t even brown their ham in that kitchen.”
Nobody in my school was Jewish. I identified as a Jew and resented the Christmas music and pageants. My mother said instead of being angry, why don’t you teach them about Judaism? Every year I would teach kids about Hanukkah. I also refused to participate in the air raid drill. I would tell my teacher my mom said I don’t have to do it. I wasn’t afraid of Communists. I knew some. They were the crazy old women with canes who came to our house for meetings, and showed us slideshows of their trips to the USSR and told me there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and I would argue with them and laugh at them. They weren’t scary people who were going to drop bombs on me.
The House Un-American Committee (HUAC) Comes to Minneapolis
When HUAC came to Minneapolis in 1963, they publicly named Meridel, my parents, and dozens of their friends as communists. Meridel had personally kept the Communist Party Bookstore on 22nd and Hennepin open. She lived on 18th and Colfax and she would walk over there every morning and open the store.
Ruth Gordienco was HUAC’s professional testifier. She would follow them from around the country to testify about all the Communists in that city. HUAC did not pursue Meridel Le Sueur or Rachel Tilsen. The paper just published Gordianco’s testimony saying they were Communists.
HUAC did go after my father, calling him to testify. He told them to go to hell and refused to take the 5th. He argued that there was no legislative purpose for the committee and therefore he did not have to answer to them. The Committee was invalid. There was a lot of fear that he was going to prison for contempt. Some of our friends who refused to testify or take the 5th faced job loss or prison. One friend, John Forsight, denied he was a Communist and went to prison for perjury. He said he belonged to a peace organization, but was never a member of the Communist Party. My mother took a lot of tranquilizers during that period.
Son of the Lawyer, Ken Tilsen, Who Talked Back to HUAC
I became familiar with political organizations for the first time. Ken Tilsen was on the front page of the paper. I began going to meetings of the committee to abolish HUAC, where I was suddenly somebody—Ken Tilsen’s son. At fifteen, I was planning rallies, designing leaflets and giving speeches. My introduction to being a political activist was a heady experience. I loved the attention. From there I jumped right into the Committee to End the War in Vietnam; a high school kid, hanging out with college kids. I became a draft counselor. I hitchhiked to Madison one summer to volunteer with the National Committee to End the War in Vietnam. I was very naïve. I thought I knew a lot. I didn’t know much.
DFL Representative Politics, 1968
I went to Goddard College in Vermont—a political and hippy place in 1966— and stayed for two years, returning to Minneapolis in 1968. My parents were very involved in the McCarthy Campaign. I latched on to my Dad, who was the coordinator of the campaign for the southern half of Minnesota. We went to all the DFL conventions. I got into the intricacies of the DFL rules, fighting for proportional representation. Some places anti-war youth walked out and had their own convention. Other places they back-benched: went to the back benches in the same hall and had their own convention. My dad represented them all, and the back-benchers won. I went with him to the 1968 convention in Chicago. We were there before it started. I carried my Dad’s papers as he worked the inside represented people to the credentials committee, including the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, as he had also done four years earlier. We left the day before the convention started and watched the whole thing on TV. I wished I had stayed around for what was happening on the outside.
Summerhill School
I worked at an alternative residential elementary school on an island in Lake Minnetonka called Summerhill School. My youngest brother, Mark, went there. He had severe learning disabilities that his teachers saw as discipline problems. He was an extremely smart kid who couldn’t learn to read. They found Cort and Susan Smith who had started a school in Loring Park based on the Summerhill book. We all read the Summerhill book. It was hard not to get sucked into its philosophy.
A friend of Meridel’s who taught at Princeton, specialized in teaching dyslexic kids. She came to visit, met Mark and said, let him come live with me for six months and he will learn to read. Within a month he was writing letters home, which was amazing. Her early research would later become nationally known.
I went to the U of M for a couple years. I didn’t like it. I took classes in math and theater. I met Mischa Penn who was the best teacher I ever met so I took every class he taught. He did this class called History of Racism. Almost all the black students on campus took that course. There were 72 black students at the U in 1968, a couple dozen of them were athletes on scholarships.
Rosemary Freeman
One of those students was Rosemary Freeman who grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi. She first came to the Twin Cities on a national tour to raise money for a voter registration drive in 1965. Her group was staying at a house in St. Paul and someone burned a cross on the lawn. The white people in the house went to the window and the black people hit the floor. That was the first cross burning I had ever heard of in Minnesota.
After that, the group came and stayed at our house. Rosemary was my age, a high school junior. She had been arrested 37 times. One time they poured lye on the bottom of her jail cell floor. She had scars on the bottom of her feet from the lye. She told these stories to white audiences in Mendota Heights, raising money for the movement. I hadn’t done shit as far as I was concerned. She had risked her life over and over. I had never met anybody who said, “I’m working on something worth dying for.” She didn’t say it with bravado or bragging. I was in awe.
Congress, or Assembly, of Unrepresented People (COUP–AOUP)
That summer of 1965 I ended up going to DC and getting arrested, pretty much because I just had to fucking do something. My mom had made me promise not to get arrested, and of course that was the reason I was going—the reason everyone was going. It was the Congress of Unrepresented People—COUP organized by Dave Dillinger, AJ Musty, Staughten Lynd and Joan Baez. All these SNCC people came up to it too—Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis. There was concern about the name from more moderate forces and it was changed the name to Assembly of Unrepresented People. Our plan was to assemble at the Lincoln Memorial, march down the Mall to the Capitol—which is always open—into the House of Representatives, sit in the seats and declare peace with the people of Vietnam. That was the plan. When we got to the steps of the Capitol they wouldn’t let us in. We sat on the steps until we all got arrested. Since I was a juvenile, I got sent with all the other juveniles who were almost all SNCC folks. They put us in the big gym where we sang freedom songs. I was having a great time. My Dad called a lawyer friend of his in DC and we got out.
I wanted to go to Mississippi with the SNCC youth. I was told by the leadership, in a very nice way, “No, we need you in Minnesota.” It was an affirmative way to be told that my job was to organize my own community. Now that I have read SNCC history I know this was when SNCC was asking their white volunteers to leave. I didn’t know that then. What I thought was someone took the time to tell me where I was needed.
Rosemary Freeman and the Takeover of Morrill Hall
When Rosemary was leaving Minnesota, she had expressed that she feared for her life. My mother said if you want to come and live with us anytime and go to school up here, you are welcome. Rosemary told her mom that this white lady in Minnesota had invited her back. Her family said go for it. She just showed up. And that is how she became my sister.
When Rosemary went to the U, she organized the Afro-American Action Committee. The AAAC included people like Alan Page, Randy Staten, John Wright, and other people who went on to become well known. The AAAC took over Morrill Hall in 1968. During the takeover, I was inside with SDS, acting as a buffer between the outside and the black students who were inside in the business area. We thought the police would come, but they never did. Instead we were dealing with the screaming people saying, “I need to pay my tuition, I want to switch classes…” We said, “Sorry, Morrill Hall is closed.” The result of the takeover was the creation of the Afro American studies department at the U and the MLK scholarship fund.
Minnesota 8
I was involved with opposing the draft. A bunch of people from the Draft Information Center were destroying draft board files to the point where in the last 18 months of the war, no-one was drafted because there were no records. We know this was true in Minnesota. We suspect it is true for other parts of the country. The government has never acknowledged this so it is not part of the official history. One day they broke into four draft boards. One was cleaned out. There were FBI agents waiting in the other three. Those arrested became known as the Minnesota 8. I am still friends with all of them. My father was head of the legal defense for them. I worked on the defense. One of the 8, Bill Tilton, called the judge, “A good Nazi.” He got the maximum sentence.
We had three trials, three different strategies. The last trial was focused on proving how immoral the war was and how the destruction of draft files was a legitimate response. Frank Kroncke was a seminary student enamored with Vatican II, so people made religious arguments.
Pentagon Papers
During that trial we got a call from a former Pentagon researcher who said he had all the evidence on the lies and immorality of the war in a couple of bank boxes. His name was Daniel Ellsberg. He was trying to figure out how to make it public without going to prison. We thought he was kinda crazy, but he did have the stuff. He planned to get on the stand and provide the Pentagon Papers as evidence. The judge said he could testify, but he couldn’t release the papers, so he found another way to release them: the New York Times. I will never forget him sitting in our living room telling my Dad how Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, MacNamara, had lied. My mother said, “How can we trust him? He worked for all these people.” But she ended up liking him.
Wounded Knee
In 1973 my Dad phoned me with a request. He was getting calls about a growing number of people in Rapid City, South Dakota getting arrested and jailed. Would I drive him to Rapid City? He would sleep in the car, I would get a hotel and he would go to jail and see what was happening.
It was the third day of the occupation of Wounded Knee. The jail was full of Indians. My Dad said, “The Federal Court is never closed. Let’s wake up this magistrate and this judge, get them down here and get these people out of jail.” AIM leader Madonna Thunder Hawk, who became a life-long friend, said she never heard of Indians having lawyers before. “When Indians got arrested they went to jail.”
Our whole family became deeply involved in Wounded Knee. My mother was one of the leaders of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, WKLD/OC. There were close to 400 federal indictments coming out of Wounded Knee and we ended up with trials in North Dakota, Minneapolis, and Rapid City. Later, there were civil disturbances—the Government called them riots— in Custer and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, around the trials. Those were state charges. We won almost all of the federal charges, though some people who were on federal probation did go back to jail. There were some people charged with interfering with a civil disorder that were convicted, but they didn’t end up serving time.
There were treaty hearings because all of the cases, from the defense perspective, were based on the premise that treaty rights had been violated. Rather than have to argue the treaty in every trial, there was one big treaty hearing in Lincoln, Nebraska. We brought in all these historians and treaty experts like Vine Deloria. Leonard Crow Dog was there with his entourage camping in a neighborhood park. The judge ruled that while the US record with regard to Indians was terrible, it was up to Congress to rectify it. I thought it was a chickenshit decision. My younger brother Mark quit school, moved to South Dakota and never came back. For all of us, it was an education.
Experimental College at the University of Minnesota
I got involved in the Experimental College because of my experience with Summerhill. I met with some of the organizers and told them of my experience. When they started the program I hung around, because I liked the people. Marv Davidov was teaching there. Val Woodward a bio chemist, and Kurt Meyers, a physicist, taught a class called “Science for Vietnam.” I ended up getting hired to teach in the second and third year and living with some undergraduate students in Experimental College at the Bread and Roses Commune. They did original research on Agent Orange, proved that it caused abnormalities in baby mammals. My friend, Jim Mullin, presented their findings at a conference. It was there I met Barb Tilsen and fell in love. We were married in 1976. We are still together. I’m hoping I get another 48 years with her.
Jim Mullin lived at Bread and Roses, and created a print shop in our basement with found equipment. He taught all of us printing. We called it Christopher Robin’s Printers Collective because we liked Winnie the Pooh. We did all the printing for the Wounded Knee Committee, AIM, Farm Workers organizing, the anti-war movement, and the coop movement. We met some friends who also had a printing business in their basement they called Haymarket Press. We were growing and our equipment was old; they had good printing equipment and we had good press operators so we merged the two, rented a storefront on 32nd and Cedar and opened it up as Haymarket Press. I managed it.
Eventually we bought a building on 35th and Cedar across from Matt’s Bar and it became a much bigger print shop. We became a union shop, did work for political candidates, and learned about direct mail, raising $40,000 a month for the Wounded Knee Committee to maintain offices around the country. My brother Mark and I did concert promotion for performers Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Harry Belafonte, and Willy Nelson when they did fundraisers for WKLDOC. I eventually left the print shop because I didn’t like how it was being managed.
When the Oglala shooting happened in 1976, I lived in the area for eight months and served as the court-appointed investigator. Those defendants were eventually acquitted, though the case was similar to Leonard Peltier’s. Peltier was facing extradition in Canada and so he was not part of that trial. Had he been part of that trial, who knows what would have happened.
Black Hills Alliance
After that, a lot of us got involved with water issues in Western South Dakota. There were a high number of miscarriages in both livestock and people living around the Black Hills area. We identified it as connected to the uranium mining in the Black Hills that did not properly dispose of the tailings—radioactive waste from the mining process. The Black Hills Alliance that developed brought together white ranchers, environmentalists and Indian people. It was an unusual coalition, especially for South Dakota. There were similar coalitions developing around fishing rights in Washington State, so it wasn’t unique, but it was special.
Out of the Black Hills Alliance came the 1980s Black Hills Survival Gathering, a 10-day communing of thousands of people on a ranch near Rapid City. The Rapid City Journal said the Gathering was the third-largest city in South Dakota for ten days. There were experts from all over the world doing workshops on alternative energy and sustainable development.
Alida Dayton came for two days and paid a cab to wait in the parking lot, which got lots of comments, but we appreciated her. She was one of our major funders.
Infrastructure and Sustainable Development on Pine Ridge
After Wounded Knee, AIM had found itself in a better position on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations to elect people to the tribal council and run people for tribal chair, but the question was what could be done to build a sustainable economy? There were no jobs on Pine Ridge, no banks or ATM machines, no housing. The roads were terrible. The reservation had the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the country: basically Third World conditions in the middle of the United States. The Survival Gathering brought people from around the world who had engaged in alternative economic development. Out of those workshops we published a book, Keystone to Survival. Out of that came a plan for infrastructure for Pine Ridge.
There was no private sector economy on the reservation. The two main employers were the government and the Catholic Church. There was nothing more than a convenience store and a gas station. Most of the BIA employees did not live on the reservation. There was no newspaper, no way to find out what happened at tribal council meetings on a reservation the size of Connecticut.
The first step in the development plan was to start a public radio station. My brother Mark committed himself to the project and I worked on fundraising for it. It changed everything. Every home had KILI Radio on. They did music, broadcasted tribal meetings, even did play-by- play for high school basketball. The second step was to support a college, beginning with a nursing school and then expanding. Today the Oglala Lakota College is flourishing and has some Masters’ degrees. The third step was to create the Lakota Fund to help entrepreneurs open up hotels, coffee shops, and grocery stores.
Direct Expressions
Mark and I created Direct Expressions to build funds for KILI Radio, Wounded Knee District School, and Porcupine Health Clinic. The Clinic was essential. The reservation had a high number of people with diabetes. Before the Clinic, if people needed dialysis they had to drive to Rapid City, two and a half hours away, three times a week.
Mark and I expanded Direct Expressions and it became our work for many years, developing into an award-winning, well-respected company. We did direct mail, broadcast advertising and political fundraising. We were part of Wellstone’s first election, which was exciting. We were hired by Prairie Island Tribe to organize the coalition against nuclear storage when NSP wanted to store nuclear waste from the power plant on the reservation.
However, it was the Native American entities—KILI Radio and the Oglala College—that kept us in business. In turn, we raised enough money for them to make them stable entities. The college’s endowment was large enough that they were able to stay open during the government shutdown when other colleges were closing. That is a source of pride. When we were ready to move on, we gave Direct Expressions to our Native American employees.
Minneapolis School Board
I ran for Minneapolis School Board the first time in 1982 and lost. I was elected in 1984 and served two four-year terms. I chose not to run for reelection in 1992. I learned three secrets to being an effective school board member.
- Give credit away.
- Find the things that are doing well and figure out how to nurture them. Do they need funding, space, publicity, a new facilitator? Sometimes they needed to continue to work out of the public eye.
- Find things that are really bad, point them out and bring public awareness to stop or change them.
One of the first things I did was get corporal punishment eliminated. Assistant Principals and teachers had paddles on the walls in their offices. They said they used them as a threat, but evidence from students and parents was that kids were getting paddled. In my argument against it I quipped: if we hurry up we can enter the 20th Century before it’s over! We found that some schools had padded cells for mostly Black and Indigenous kids. We brought that practice in Special Ed to light to stop it. The Principals’ Union never liked me after that.
We were the first school district in the nation, and the first governmental body in Minnesota, to give full benefits to partners regardless of gender. It was a solution to a human problem. People would die and their partners couldn’t get their death benefits. People couldn’t add their partners onto their health benefits. Shay Berkowitz, who worked in a middle school, lobbied me to work on that.
It took courage in 1990 to say, “I’m gay and working in a school.” A gay administrator who was in the closet at work and was afraid to support this. It was Shay’s organizing among the teachers that made it happen. We got it passed in 1990-1991 through health insurance companies so that any partner could be co-insured.
We opened Green Central School and Anne Sullivan. An Indian magnet school, Four Winds, was not so successful but it was worth trying. We protected the funding of Heart of the Earth and Southside Family schools: Charter schools run by parents. I did not support the for-profit Charter schools where the money went to stockholders, not students.
Joining Students in a Walkout
When the Gulf War broke out, students at Roosevelt called me and said, we want to walk out and the Principal says he will suspend us. What do we do? I said I’ll be there. I walked with them and gave a speech and it was on the news. The Principal at Roosevelt complained about me to the Superintendent. The administration, Superintendent and other School Board members were not happy with me, but it made it harder for them to expel those students, having a school board member with them.
School Board Pay and District Representation
The School Board work could be a full-time job. I had another full-time job and had three kids. Other members were retired. Three were supported by their spouses. At the time I thought School Board Members should be paid more so working people could serve. Since then the Board has expanded and the workload is less.
When I was on the Board, we were all elected at large. Some thought we needed district reps. I was convinced to vote for the change. I don’t, in retrospect, think it was a good idea. The Board has become much more fractured and political. Part of that reflects changes in the city and the country. When I was on the Board all of us felt the awesome responsibility we had to 40,000 MPS students (now it’s 30,000) and to our neighbors from whom we levied taxes to provide students an education.
Safety in Schools
Students have a right to be safe in school. I led the charge for a campaign against weapons in the schools (though we were not going to have metal detectors). If you had a paper route and you needed a knife, you left the knife at home. That was a big public PR campaign we worked on. We did have two killings during the time I served and both were devastating.
I was deeply concerned about the well-being of our students, creating a safe and nurturing space for them filled with caring adults. I didn’t think there were enough caring adults around to fulfill student needs. I worked a lot on this.
Youth Coordinating Board and Neighborhood Revitalization Project
Through my role as a School Board member I worked on the Youth Coordinating Board and the Neighborhood Revitalization Project (NRP). The Youth Board was set up by Don Fraser and made up of members of the School Board, County Board, Park Board, City Council, Juvenile Court Judge, and Legislatures from Minneapolis. I worked with Mayor Fraser to lead that organization, seeking coordination of youth programs.
The School Board was part of NRP because it took property taxes from downtown. There was all that new development downtown in those years—Target Center, the Convention Center, etc.—and a new pot of property tax revenue. The idea was to put control of spending it in the hands of neighborhoods. That never really happened. There were grants made for rehab and painting and all those things, but the actual decentralization of power, which is what I liked, never happened. The City Council was not willing to share power and there was no constituency for turning down the money and fighting for the original vision. I was on the NRP Board from 1990-1992, and tried to fight for that original vision, without success.
City Politics
After serving on the School Board, I continued to be a city activist and urban advocate, educating myself about urban affairs and the particular issues facing Minneapolis. I have worked on political campaigns. I worked on Dean Zimmerman’s defense. He was set up by the FBI. He took a donation for the Green Party. This year I worked on the MN Senate Campaign of Omar Fateh, and Ilhan Omar’s campaign. I have had lots of conversations with people at Temple Israel where we are members, who believed Omar was anti-Semitic. I don’t agree. I have never been afraid of having civil arguments.
Software for School Districts and the United Nations
I got a job at a software company which paid well. I went all over the world building cutting-edge software. I was good at that. I quickly started refusing to work for corporations that were involved in the military. Since those were the most lucrative and provided the most stability, others wanted them. Nobody else wanted to do school districts, hospitals and government organizations because they did things on the cheap and had management problems, so I did those: Omaha and Pittsburgh Public Schools, LA Unified School District, and lots of hospitals and colleges. I went to Copenhagen and worked with the United Nations Special Projects, the group that goes in after hurricanes and earthquakes and provides disaster relief. Disaster relief is a huge management problem. You have all these donations from all these countries, trucks and pallets of food and water to keep track of and distribute to those in need. We ended up barcoding everything that came in so knew where everything went. It was exciting and fun and felt great—complicated and important, and I was working with dedicated people. I loved doing it.
Volunteer Projects in Retirement: Tanka Bars and Women’s Self Defense
I retired in 2014. I had some heart issues which made it impossible to work. Since then I have volunteered. It has been nice to have the time to donate my skills. The people who took over Direct Expressions created a snack food company: Native American Natural Foods. Their primary product is the Tanka Bar, a buffalo and cranberry bar based on wasna, a traditional food made of buffalo with berries with salt pounded into it. The cranberries in the Tanka Bar come from tribes in Wisconsin. I was able to donate the software for NANF. Since I retired I have also donated software for a women’s self-defense organization in Seattle called Home Alive, created after some women working nights, didn’t make it home. My daughter was working there.
This Moment We are In
I had nine weeks of radiation treatment for prostate cancer in March and April of this year, and as a result, I have a depressed immune system, so I haven’t gone to demonstrations. I am trying to be careful in the time of COVID-19. My daughter delivers our groceries.
On George Floyd, my involvement has focused on writing, mostly through SouthSide Pride. I have also created a couple of videos on the aftermath.
We have made oodles of chicken barbecue and our daughter delivered it to the women’s homeless encampment. I think about how I can lock my door, turn on my electricity, fill my pantry and refrigerator, turn on my security system at night. The people across the street from me in tents have none of that. I am very upset at the non-response of the city, the county, and especially them ayor, to the homelessness crisis exacerbated by the pandemic. Jacob Frey was quoted in the paper excusing his lack of action, saying, “The needs of the homeless are infinite.” In fact, they are not infinite. We can identify each person and address their needs for stable housing. His comment increased my desire to want to recruit some young creative person of color to run for Mayor against him.
An Examined Life
I’m 72 years old. I have tried to live a life that is examined; to be disciplined about making the world a better place. I am non-violent. I have never been in fist fight in my life. I have been accused of being verbally abusive and I take that seriously. I have changed how I interact with people, especially women. In the early women’s liberation movement, I and other verbose men were accused of not letting women speak enough. People didn’t call it mansplaining then, but that’s what it was. I have tried to listen to those criticisms and be as non-violent as I can. I think being a white, male, heterosexual person in America is a kind of violence you have to fight against. That has been the struggle of my life: to be the kind of person my daughters and wife would want to live with, and a man my feminist great-grandmother, grandmother and mother would be proud of.
Joy
I have two daughters, a son, and four grandchildren. Barbara has been my partner for almost 50 years. They are all joy of my life. Barb has saved my life many times and has been my source of happiness. We now have lots of Zoom time with our children and grandchildren and occasional in-person time at six feet away. I hope soon we will be able to be in the same place and give each other hugs.