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The truth is that I, like so many of you, spent 2016 trying to hold on to what joy I could. I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one. And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.
The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.
Even in my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.
The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time.
Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.
There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of simply imagining them.
I want the sunlight whistling its way across our faces to be always amber & never an absent hue that might mistake our lineage for something safe.
It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around.
Celebrating while still fighting, which is perhaps what represents the ethos of this country more than anything else. To bear witness to so much death that could easily be your own is to push toward redefining what it is to be a patriot in this country. It is even to push toward redefining “country,” until it becomes a place where there is both pride AND safety.
Our fights aren’t going to be equal in the world, but if we are pushing our backs against the same barriers of injustice, I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am. It is a task, some days. To think about your consistent kindness as, instead, a product of restraint.
America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves. Everything is a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, or a march where no one was beaten or killed. This is why the telling of our own stories has always been important.
Still, as thankful as I am to come from hands that still reach out for forgiveness, I am even more thankful to come from a people who know the necessity of rebuilding. Who know what a church does, know how to drink all they can from it, and refuse to let it be torn from them.
The way I’d like to imagine it, our grandmothers are with us, even when they’re not with us. Teaching us how to pray. Teaching us how to survive.
The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short. They are, like sleep and death, within the same family, a quick nudge pushing one directly into the other.
I think of how foolish I was, to once pray for a country’s mercy, and how thankful I am that those prayers were not answered. How, through this resistance, we might find a freedom where no mercy is required. We might find a humanity that is not asking to be seen, but demanding instead. How we all pray for the wrong things sometimes, but somehow, God is greater.
Live music, even at its most unhealthy and potentially violent, has historically provided a small mercy for young people who found no mercy elsewhere.
It is a luxury to be able to tear your gaze away from something; to only be made aware of old and consistent blood by a newer shedding of blood. It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary. It is a luxury to be unafraid and analyze the very real fear of others.
It is summer and white people are sad on the internet about black people dying again.
Additionally, when black people singing songs about guns and drugs make it to number one in a country where black people are arrested and killed for guns or drugs or less than that, it can feel a bit like life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience.
Let the children have their world. Their miraculous, impossible world where nothing hurts long enough to stop time. Let them have it for as long as it will hold them. When that world falls to pieces, maybe we can use whatever is left to build a better one for ourselves.
