I’ve been sitting with the images coming out of my hometown of Minneapolis–St. Paul over the past month, especially the last week, and what I’m feeling is both deeply personal and painfully universal.
I think about many of the people I grew up with as working-class, proud, decent people who now see the world very differently than I do. They feel looked down upon. Controlled. Displaced. And that part, I understand. We all grew up knowing what it felt like to be on the outside of privilege. Of the people we called the “cake eaters.”
Where some of my boyhood neighbors, schoolmates, and teammates and I diverged is where that pain has landed. And I suspect this divergence isn’t unique to our community, or even to our country.
Somehow, the energy that once pointed toward unfair economic systems, rigged rules, and concentrated power has been redirected.
On one side, it’s aimed at minorities, immigrants, “elites,” urban progressives, and anyone perceived as other. On the other side, it’s aimed at “deplorables,” the ignorant, rural Americans, and anyone deemed backward or bigoted.
Both sides have found their villains. Both sides have their tropes. And both sides are letting the real architects of economic inequality off the hook.
That redirection has a name: scapegoating.
Scapegoating is not stupidity. It’s displacement.
Scapegoating doesn’t arise because people are ignorant or evil. It arises because the pain is real, the injustice is felt, and the true causes are complex, abstract, and threatening to confront.
So the anger gets reassigned to something simpler, more visible, more immediate.
Instead of asking, “What system produces this inequality?” the question becomes, “Who can I blame?”
That shift doesn’t heal the wound. It protects the system that caused it.
This isn’t new. It’s ancient.
Scapegoating is one of humanity’s oldest mechanisms. It turns fear into righteousness. It converts humiliation into dominance. It creates unity through opposition. And it distracts people from confronting real power.
Empires have relied on it forever. So have corrupt systems.
When people fight each other, they don’t look up.
I am not your enemy. And you are not mine.
This matters to me deeply: The people being blamed today are not the ones who designed financial extraction. They didn’t hollow out communities. They didn’t concentrate wealth and influence into fewer and fewer hands.
They are not the enemy.
And neither are the people who feel angry, displaced, or forgotten.
The enemy (if we’re going to use that word at all) is the system itself. It’s the economic structures that create inequality, and the conditioning that keeps us from seeing them clearly. It’s the steady drip of narratives that turn neighbor against neighbor while power consolidates quietly above the noise.
The real work is harder. And less emotionally satisfying.
It’s much easier to fight culture wars, point fingers, choose sides, and win arguments.
It’s much harder to name unjust systems, sit with complexity, refuse false villains, and demand fairness without scapegoats.
But only the second path leads anywhere real.
Where I stand
I can live with disagreement. I can live with compromise. I can live with uncertainty.
What I cannot live with is manufactured injustice, legitimized by power and disguised by scapegoating.
Not because I think I’m right, but because I believe fairness and justice are the only ground that actually holds.
So if you’re angry, I hear you. If you feel diminished, I believe you. If you feel played, you probably were.
Just don’t let that pain be weaponized to turn us against each other.
Because the system is pitting us against one another when the system itself is the problem.
I am not the enemy. And neither are you.
