Moments before, a mob of masked agents pushed toward him, knocking a woman to the ground — someone Pretti instinctively moved to help. Maybe Renée Good could have turned her car a bit further to the left. As a Wisconsin native with family in Minneapolis, being “Midwest nice” and being a “good neighbor” are baked into the fabric of my existence. Midwest nice has been activated into Midwest rage, a collective “do wrong to ours, and we’ll show you what taking care of our neighbors means.” It looks like peaceful protests spanning city blocks, with more than 50,000 people gathering at a time. Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains.