After reading a letter from a reader complaining about the article because it was not objective, I made the time to read it. I commend this paper for such a thoughtful and thorough portrait of the man behind the beautiful portrait. Over the last year of isolation, I have been grateful many times for the Star Tribune's careful and humane portraits of our neighbors. From couples dying of COVID together in nursing homes, to National Guard parents returning home, to interlocking stories of Minnesotans doing their part facing the pandemic, this paper has done us the great service of showing us each other's humanity. George Floyd was flawed, as we all are. Your portrait gave us an opportunity to see how he struggled, how he was loved and how he loved others. Please keep up these stories. They draw us together at a time when we really need it.
Does the Star Tribune Editorial Board not understand that the trial of the four officers charged with the killing of George Floyd has not yet begun? ("George Floyd and a life that mattered," Jan. 3.) As such, fairness requires that the media refrain from taking a position on guilt or innocence in their pre-trial coverage. As a Jan. 3 letter writer pointed out, the Dec. 27 special section on Floyd was bad enough, presenting, as it did, only one side of his life, the side most favorable. And how does the Editorial Board react to such criticism? By publishing an even more biased opinion of its own, going so far as to render its own opinion on the ultimate issue the jury is to decide — the cause of Floyd's death. Without even considering what medical evidence the defense might present at trial, the board tells us that Floyd "experienced a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by law enforcement officer[s]".
The balance between the constitutionally protected right of freedom of the press and the equally fundamental right of the accused in a criminal trial to an impartial jury require an even hand from the press, not a press that has clearly taken sides.
I have just read for the sixth time Michael Nesset's exquisite Opinion Exchange essay of Jan. 1 ("Just what is going on here?"), and still experience what author George Steiner in "Real Presences" calls a "talismanic quickening." With each reading, a leap of recognition occurs, an almost aching embrace of the strangeness, lovely and fearsome, that inhabits me for this little while, and will perhaps forever. Thank you, Michael. You validate the wonder of each mysterious life in the midst of the knowledge that our planet "is an inconsiderable speck, lost in the glare of its star."
My gratitude for Nesset's writing leads me to also express thankfulness for the many Minnesotans, who, over the years, have revealed good hearts and clear thinking in their letters to the editor and opinion pieces. Louise Erdrich, writing most recently on the folly of Enbridge Line 3 ("Not just another pipeline," Jan. 3), follows any number of prophetic Minnesota voices on the topic. I am thinking, too, of the many offerings referencing the utter recklessness of copper sulfide mining in the Duluth Complex and near the BWCA, all of which beseech us to forgo the lure of short-term gain in favor of preserving our greatest resource: water, without which we cannot live. Again, these are written in the prophetic — and also poetic — knowledge of the web of relationships into which we are born.
Such is the quiet power of Nesset's writing that I must also mention the two letter writers of several days ago who move beyond the easy accolades accorded Norman Borlaug, creator of the Green Revolution that unleashed a water- and chemical-intensive agriculture, to write of Borlaug's own prophecy on the tragic consequences should the technology be allowed to promote human population growth at the expense of the health of soils, waters and other living creatures.
