Brittany Packnett Cunningham

The other thing, though, Glennon, that your question is bringing to mind that I really, really want people to understand is that this is worse.

And I actually don't think people are getting that.

I think it is convenient to have nostalgia about...

what you say you were doing in 2014 or 2015 or what you say you were doing in 2020, whether you were actually doing that is a different conversation.

But it's easy to have nostalgia about it and feel your activist adrenaline rising again and think that we're dealing with the same thing.

As I've been reminding people, when we were on the streets in 2014 in Ferguson, we did not have a friendly local government, but we had a warm federal government.

We had in President Obama somebody who wanted to assemble people to talk solutions.

Now, they might not have been the solutions that everybody agreed with.

But there was an open door.

There was a curiosity.

There was a question to say, how can we figure this out and how can we figure it out together?

Dealing with a warm democratic government is very different than dealing with authoritarians.

I would venture to say that dealing with George Bush, dealing with early 2000s Republicans is very different than what we're dealing with now.

So if your activist adrenaline is raising up because of what you did to push back against the Iraq war, I need you to understand that it's different right now.

Let me just share with you some of the things that I'm hearing from people that I know and that I've been connected to in Minnesota.

I want us all to put ourselves in the mind of folks who were born into immigrant families who cannot see their parents, not because their parents are halfway across the world, but because their parents are across town and neither of them can come out of the house because it's unsafe.

You cannot go out of the house to go grocery shopping, to go check on your elders, to go get a cup of coffee.

I want us to think about those same immigrant families and the parents of those immigrant families who came to America looking for a better life.

Some of them leaving war-torn countries who are comparing this experience not to 2020, but to the war that they escaped.

That's the comparison that they're drawing.