With the passing of Pope Francis, the world has lost a true moral compass. But his passing reminds me of people I knew in Minneapolis who exhibited a real sense of right and wrong and took action to bring change. And now is the time for leaders in Minneapolis to convene community discussions and ask the question, “What is right and what is wrong?”
I attended De La Salle high school. When not concentrating on plane geometry or biology, the Christian Brothers were often teaching moral issues. But one teacher in particular, Paul Graf, was passionate about taconite tailings, and the harm they were doing to Lake Superior. Hardly a class went by when we didn’t learn about the latest outrage in northern Minnesota mining. His zeal for protecting Lake Superior was infectious and more and more people became concerned about the water quality of our most magnificent lake. Now there are groups like the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) that continue Paul’s work to protect the Lake.
I knew and worked with a handful of individuals in Minneapolis who each possessed a strong sense of right and wrong. Joe Selvaggio, founder of Project for Pride in Living, devoted his life to helping people in need – whether that need was affordable housing, job training, or learning English. He annually refused to accept a director’s salary comparable with other nonprofit directors. PPL has been around now for over 50 years, helping countless people become self-sufficient because Joe’s moral compass.
Jim Shannon had become a priest, then a bishop in the Catholic Church. At 35, he was named president of St. Thomas. He was a leading figure of Catholic higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. But his ideas of right and wrong didn’t follow those of the Catholic Church. So, he left to marry and speak out on the issues of birth control, marriage of priests, and ordination of women. Shannon followed his conscience even though it meant loss of his position and opportunity to become a cardinal. As president of the Geneal Mills Foundation, he invested in many programs helping poor people. This happened because he lived his beliefs about right and wrong.
Paul Marino and Bernie Becker were executive director and chief council for Minneapolis Legal Aide Society. When local landlords were abusing tenants in Minneapolis, they helped me organized the Minneapolis Tenants Union. One of these incidents resulted in state legislation prohibiting illegal lockouts. Marino and Becker also helped a group of community organizers put a stop to the proposed Cedar Square West development, which would have destroyed a working-class neighborhood on the West Bank.
I knew each of these individuals personally. And I knew how hard it was for them to achieve the things they did. Nothing came easy. Selvaggio worked – worked hard. He was present in the community and fighting for the world he wanted. Shannon had to abandon his whole life to live his truth. Marino and Becker were often bashed by landlords and honestly, made little money helping people. And it has gotten even harder today to do what is right. Social media in particular incentivizes people to be hurtful to each other, rather than coming together to do what is right.
I was struck by Emily Koski’s letter withdrawing from the Mayor’s race. In it, she said:
“The toxicity in our city’s politics is real. It punishes integrity, vilifies collaboration, and prioritizes power over people. It’s a system where doing what’s right isn’t just difficult, it’s discouraged at every turn. The only antidote is change. Real, systemic, courageous change. I believed we could be that change—that our campaign could be the inoculation. But instead of spending time with residents and talking about how to fix the real problems facing our neighborhoods, I found myself spending hours and hours fundraising just to stay afloat, working tirelessly to reject lies spread by anonymous donors and political action committees.”
So perhaps the death of Pope Francis can inspire people throughout Minneapolis to ask moral questions about how we live and how we live together. What is right and what is wrong. And how are we going to live the truths of those answers.
Mr. Feehan, I was with you 100%, right up to the point where you invoked Council Member Koski’s withdrawal letter from the Mayoral race. Let me brief you on Ms. Koski.
Ward 11, where I live, is among the two or three wards that has the smallest number of voters having sympathies for the DSA and their allies. In 2017, in a rare (for us) hotly-contested race, we tossed aside our accomplished Council Member John Quincy for a newcomer, Jeremy Schroeder. Schroeder ran “to the left” of Quincy on a few parochial issues, but was otherwise not distinguishable as anything “radical”. And, mostly, that’s how he served. However, after the killing of George Floyd, Schroeder got on that platform in Powderhorn Park and promised with the rest of the Council Members up there to “Defund the Police”. His Ward 11 fate was sealed.
In 2021, ANYONE could have beaten him for the Ward 11 seat, but we got much better. Emily Koski presented herself as a reasonably faithful successor to the careful, pragmatic progressivism of the last SEVERAL predecessors of Schroeder. And in the 2-year term that she won, she did an awesome job of representing the Ward, and of doing good work for the City as a whole. She is largely responsible for the City even HAVING a budget process in the new Strong Mayor system – as Budget Chair, she did almost all the hard work of developing it.
Then, in 2023, she won re-election against only token opposition. But not enough other pragmatic progressives did. She found herself facing a majority of Council Members from the DSA/Mpls4theMany coalition. But even counting “on-the-fence” members, they did not have a large enough majority to override vetoes by Mayor Frey, who had been an ally and supporter of Koski in BOTH of her election campaigns. That is, they did not have enough (9) to override Frey until Koski decided to change sides and vote with that group (sometimes), or, perplexingly, vote with the Mayor on an issue, only to change sides THE VERY NEXT WEEK and provide a 9th vote to override. She did this at least twice that I am aware of, both of those times on important, high-visibility, issues.
It was one of the most cynical performances I have ever seen in local politics.
I am convinced that, had she chosen to run for re-election in Ward 11 after taking the actions she did in the second of her two 2-year terms, she would not have been re-elected. I know far too many people who voted for her, twice, who would not have done so again. I am one of them.
Her withdrawal letter sounds noble, and I am not surprised that anyone might be taken in by it. But once one knows the whole story of her tenure, its utter self-serving cynicism becomes apparent.