Knot Pining: Talk beats perceptions

I’m jazzed about an event coming to a Cloquet church this month. It’s just what we need in these fractured political times. Our Savior’s Lutheran Church will be the venue for a “Respectful Conversation” about this political season, sponsored by the Minnesota Council of Churches, at 6 p.m. on Aug. 28. It’s designed to allow space for people to explore their feelings about candidates and issues minus the “my way or the highway” responses.

A church is a good place to hold such a conversation. People tend to drop their defenses, and perhaps most vehement mantras, at church.

As a kid, church was a social event. A chance to check in weekly on people’s lives, back when community wasn’t a buzzword, it actually was a thing. In the basement after services I’d grab a cup of coffee and a stale, unadorned donut and sit down with my friends’ parents and neighbors. They seemed fascinated that a young teenager would take interest in all the adult talk. I indeed did. I’ve had a journalist’s hat on for a very long time.

In that basement I learned about a family moving to Alaska when the dad got a job on the pipeline. I heard about the girl who was attending a different school taking vocal lessons and wanting to be a music star. I heard about how the crops were doing, plans for the summer, tips on getting by in a recession economy, opportunities to help out others. The whole gamut.

And it was all done with nary a sniff of politics. Today’s suffocating political atmosphere is making us all crazy, and I wish we all could just turn the dial back a bit.

Maybe the discussion on the 28th will reveal a way to do that.

When I reminisce about my hometown and childhood, I find a comparison to today striking. I have spent a lot of my adult life explaining who I am. Back home, that work was already done.

When identity politics come up — and I can think of one particular candidate who looks to be re-upping his efforts to paint his opponent as some sort of “other” he doesn’t understand — my blood boils.

Nobody should have to explain their racial identity. As a point of curiosity, maybe, just maybe, if it’s in some context of the conversation. No one will ask a white person “Where are you really from?” when you first meet them. No one will ask a white person “So how did you get the job?” and then talk about affirmative action. No one will ask a white person to get ready, no offense, for a crude racial joke.

Such is my experience.

We are all far beyond how we look. If only we lived in a world where people would take one second to listen.

My mom called me “Michael,” as do others who love me, or even just like me. For those averse to such tender notions, it’s just Mike. Which, as my mother often said, is just fine.

Those who think everyone needs a nickname, or must bolt from any first name usage due to feeling too close, will shout out “Hey, Creegs” or “Creeger.”

That’s not my last name, but I cringe and bear it. It’s Creger, as in beggar, or, to give a shout-out to my youngest sister and her childhood cat, as in Kitty Kegger. She wasn’t good with her Rs back then.

I grew up in Kilkenny Township, Route 1, Box 106. That’s no longer the address. It’s now a long and impossible-to-remember street number. And I really don’t have to remember it, since our family sold the beloved farm we grew up on in 2022, a year after Mom died and 49 years since we first moved there.

I went to school at Montgomery-Lonsdale, which now goes by the seemingly corporate name of Tri City United, the old “Redbirds” nickname quashed for “Titans.”

Montgomery is the Kolacky Capitol of the World, and I was down for the annual celebration last month. What is a kolacky? I’ll save that tangent, but will let you know that I heard three languages growing up — Spanish, English and Czech.

I’ve worked at several newspapers across the state, and am sad to report that an alarming number of those no longer exist as I knew them. But the Faribault Daily News remains, along with the Mankato Free Press, Annandale Advocate and Marshall Independent.

There is blood on the white-tile ceiling in the Faribault Daily News composing room (I doubt said room still exists) from the time I stabbed myself with an X-Acto knife while cutting line tape. I staunched the bleeding by sticking my finger in the molten pool of wax tucked into the machine that rolled said wax onto the paper the news content was printed on, for cutting and pasting onto layout sheets on lighted tables. Those “flats” were then driven to the press across town.

I’ve been in this newspaper game since my teens in the early 1980s, when I produced, for a limited time, a family news sheet full of stories about life on the farm.

Yes, our lives are about experiences, not perceived cliches through a racial lens. I would hope that anyone would cringe when the topic comes up in political speech.

I like one of the first things Gov. Tim Walz said to Vice President Kamala Harris after he was chosen as her vice presidential candidate this week. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” he said.

I’m done with the divisiveness, the name calling, the feigned “otherness” vibe.

I’d like that joy to spread. And that old feeling of community. Maybe it can get a leg up in a church in Cloquet on a Wednesday night in late August. Have the conversation.

Mike is a writer and designer for the Pine Knot News. Reach him at [email protected]