'Ghost city'? No. But problems are real.

Good old Tom Friedman, like Charlie Brown and Dobie Gillis, is a Minnesota character who owes his fame to literature. And while we wouldn't presume to take credit for the career of Friedman, a New York Times columnist and bestselling author, he doesn't hesitate to describe his Twin Cities upbringing as formative. Growing up in St. Louis Park, he wrote in 2011, "surely had a big impact … it bred a deep optimism about America and the notion that we really can act collectively for the common good."

That reassuring tone of deep optimism and the common good was missing from Friedman's column of June 22, when he folded some observations about Minneapolis into his critique of the defund-police movement. He wrote that "big swaths of my old hometown, Minneapolis, have been turned into a dangerous and dystopian ghost city, racked by gun violence, since the police murder of George Floyd, a murder that exposed two truths for all to see: that racism in metropolitan police forces is real and appalling and requires many remedies, but also that rushing to defund or dismantle police forces without a carefully considered plan is not one of them."

"Dangerous and dystopian ghost city" is an unhelpful descriptor, coming as it does at precisely the moment that Minnesota and other U.S. vacation destinations are restarting their competition for America's tourism dollars. It stings, especially from one who knows us so well — even though the newspaper that employs Friedman once reported, ignorantly, that "grape salad" was a staple of Minnesota Thanksgiving tables. Credibility, once lost, takes time to rebuild.

It strikes us, too, that DDGC is an unnecessarily harsh label, as well as unoriginal. The word "dystopian" gets thrown around a lot, used to describe everything from a genre of young-adult fiction to China's treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Another American columnist, the often-pugilistic H.L. Mencken, once described Philadelphia as "the most Pecksniffian of American cities." That more elegant urban insult could serve as a helpful model for Friedman. If you can interrupt a reader's reflexive outrage long enough for a head-scratching trip to the dictionary, the meaning of your message might have a chance to sink in.

All of that having been said, and our wounded civic pride having been defended … we now must concede that Friedman was not quite completely wrong. He could have shown a bit more tact, but he was writing about problems that do have a basis in reality.

The level of gun violence in the city Friedman and we call home has indeed reached levels that are intolerable. The grieving parents and grandparents of dead and wounded children are giving voice to an eloquent challenge: What did our children do to you?

The defund-police movement may indeed be contributing to the city's worrying loss of police officers and its inability to recruit enough replacements.

Friedman is right about another thing. Republican-led efforts around the country to tighten election laws pose a serious threat to our democracy. And the defund-police movement helps create an environment of fear that makes the Republican platform harder to stop.

We can all agree that a native son's harsh words for his hometown were unkind, even counterproductive. But we should remember another observation from Mencken: "Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."