I live in a Twin Cities neighborhood that was a hot spot for unrest. Here's how, hour by hour, my neighbors and I are now working together to support each other.

• For over a year, Tim Watkins has lived in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the hot spots of demonstrator and police conflict this past week following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in nearby Minneapolis.
• As unrest grew over the weekend of May 30, Watkins began connecting with neighbors for the first time. Their priority was keeping everyone safe.
• The group divided each night into two-hour neighborhood watch-style shifts; they also connected on Facebook to help provide donations, groceries, and other supplies to neighbors in need.
• Forming this neighborhood bond and creating a collective goal of staying safe helped calm his and his neighbors' sense of fear and isolation, Watkins writes.

If you have been glued to the news lately, you would be forgiven for thinking that civilization is on the brink of collapse in the Twin Cities. I want you to understand that nothing could be further from the truth.

I live in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, one of the hotspots of unrest this past week following the heinous murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. I love my neighborhood, with large trees providing a canopy over our streets, a plethora of small businesses and restaurants, and residents from a range of backgrounds.

But it got so scary in my neighborhood that on the night of Thursday, May 28, my partner and I left our apartment to hide at her parents' home in the suburbs. We felt safe — but there was also a sense of shame, for we had the privilege to leave, while many of our neighbors did not.

Despite curfews going into effect, Friday represented the peak of the chaos in the Twin Cities, prompting Governor Walz to mobilize the entire Minnesota National Guard in order to quell the unrest. On Saturday we were shown images of convoys of Humvees and armored personnel carriers descending on the cities. Reports were circulating widely about an invasion of white supremacists and anarchists (mostly the former), hiding among peaceful protests, hell-bent on discrediting the righteous outrage and message of the people by sowing destruction and chaos once the sun had set.

The demonstrators themselves were not distressing: Rather, what frightened me was how agitators, using the crowds for cover, would provoke escalation by our militarized police. Unfortunately that did eventually happen, and my neighborhood seemed to have become a war zone by Thursday night, with some protesters throwing rocks and bricks at strike teams of St. Paul police, who responded with pepper balls and tear gas.

While we returned home Friday night and remained through the weekend, our leadership was reporting that we faced threats from individuals trained in urban warfare tactics, and agitators were already embedded in our neighborhoods, moving about using stolen cars without license plates. Needless to say, I was still quite anxious.

Saturday night, we again decided to stay in St. Paul. However, as my girlfriend pointed out, once curfew started at 8 p.m., I went from merely tense to obsessively hypervigilant. I stared at the street from our second-story porch, counting every minute that went by and scrutinizing every car to see whether they had license plates — the lack of which, authorities said, was a sign of outside agitators. Even that wasn't good enough, for the screen made my view of the street less than perfect. Then I saw one of my neighbors, whose name I did not know, walk out of his house and sit on his front step. That was all the excuse I needed, and I quickly ran outside and also sat down.

I sat on my front steps for a few minutes, when, feeling awkward, I said, "Hey," to my neighbor across the street. "Hey," back. Then, my neighbor two doors down, who I hadn't noticed before, stood up from her steps and walked over to me and introduced herself. We exchanged a few sentences, and she asked if I wanted to join the neighborhood text chain, as they were already communicating with one another to monitor what was happening around us. Yes, I said, absolutely. In a matter of 10 minutes, I was connected with more than a dozen people who weren't just looking out for themselves as individuals, but for the safety of everyone in our neighborhood, hoping to avoid the kind of conflict that erupted on Thursday. I know the optics of neighborhood watches can sometimes reinforce the same suspicion and paranoia that infects our police forces. But the people in my neighborhood have been very clear that the primary responsibility is ensuring the safety of our most vulnerable BIPOC and QTPOC neighbors.

Getting on that text thread was a small act that would prove transformative.

I have a confession to make: before Saturday night, I knew the names of exactly two other people on my block, despite having lived here for over a year.

I've never been good at networking, so I simply made excuses for never taking the time to introduce myself to the people who share my daily environment. The walls we build in our heads are often much thicker than the ones we sleep behind.

By Sunday, we had divided up the night into two-hour shifts. And on Monday afternoon, we had a neighborhood meeting with people from our block and the one next to us. Nearly 30 people there. We didn't really discuss watch shifts, but instead got to know one another. We talked about who else on our block we needed to check in with, and which houses had residents who might be in need due to local store closures. Several of my neighbors had already been making grocery runs for people who were otherwise unable to make it to the suburbs, where stores were still open.

Everyone was also encouraged to join a Facebook group for coordinating mutual aid throughout the entire neighborhood. It was started on May 31, and there are already over 1,600 people participating. Much of the early discussion has centered around how to be good allies for our BIPOC and QTPOC neighbors, and how to ensure their safety from the very real threats that are still moving throughout the community. Since the large-scale violence has subsided, there have unfortunately been substantiated reports from across the metro area of people finding homemade incendiary devices hidden in back alleys, garbage cans, and yard waste.

This story is just one of thousands happening in the Twin Cities. Since the protests began here a week ago, we have seen thousands of people continuing to protest peacefully against police brutality and institutional racism. Hundreds of community members have turned out each morning to clean up the areas destroyed by fire. Food donation centers have been absolutely flooded with groceries. And monetary donations have poured into funds to help rebuild the many minority-owned businesses which were destroyed by fire.

The media narrative and the pundit class make it seem that people are just mucking up their community for the hell of it, that deep down people are just a bunch of savages waiting for the opportunity to revert to our uncivilized primal selves. This is basically glorifying the violence of the protests in order to justify the violence that is enacted on communities of color every day through economics, politics, crackdowns by law enforcement and more. Instead, day by day, we're seeing huge numbers of people turning out to help lift up those most affected by the destruction, standing together with oppressed peoples and saying, "Enough."

Healing is the opposite of bootstrapping.

Conventional American mythology tells us that we live in a hyper-individualistic world, replete with bootstrapping myths of rugged individuals who do what they please. As such, we're expected to be able to solve all of our problems by ourselves. I think that's part of why many of these problems seem so insurmountable.

I am a 33-year old cisgender white male, and I moved the Twin Cities four years ago to work in labor. I believe in social justice and am aware of and uncomfortable with my own privilege. I want to be of service. But what can I individually do to change things and make the world a better place for everyone, regardless of gender, race, age, faith, or sexual orientation? The truth is, of course, that I don't have all of the answers (or even many of them). But a lot of other people have been working hard on these problems for decades, and probably the most important thing is simply to show up and lend a hand. Finding a collective purpose with my (I suppose, new) neighbors has helped to banish that fear and isolation.

By the end of the weekend, I noticed that my anxiety had dissipated by a significant degree. Over the course of 24 hours, I was forcefully reminded of something which I've always known about, but only ever understood in the abstract: We are much stronger and better together than we are apart.

Contra to cable news, civilization is not, in fact, on the brink of collapse. In that past week, I realized in a very profound way that I am not alone, that many, many people also care deeply about the well-being of everyone, and want to see justice done right. Yes, we face enormous challenges as the 2020s begin, from widespread and growing inequality to pandemics to the looming threats spurred by global climate change. But humans are fundamentally social creatures; society exists within us, and we exist within society. The only thing that will truly get us through is human solidarity. It has always been that way. The more that we can embrace the me-in-you/you-in-me, the better life can be for everyone, rather than for just the privileged few.

Tim Watkins was born in the Twin Cities, grew up in Illinois, and returned home in 2016. He works for a worker advocacy nonprofit, and he and his partner live in St. Paul with their cat, Arya.