Like the End—James Blake

#365Songs: November 17th

As I separate my cardboard
Set my tax aside to fund another war
My spirit wakes up asking
If we’re spending what we can’t afford

I played house with my best childhood friend, Dawn. She lived two doors down on a humble street in a working class Cleveland suburb. As homes go, we were safe and loved, watched over. There was darkness out there, as there always is somewhere nearby, but it was far enough for us that we needed to invent our dramas. We built houses of cardboard and old wood gathering dust in the garages, out of pillows and couch cushions, sometimes out of snow and fallen leaves. For us, that was the safest place in the world until, as things go, the house would crumble in on itself. Or a mother would yell, “dinner.”

We didn’t know about the Cold War or Reagan’s cruelty against those with mental illness or how his government ignored the AIDS epidemic, even as millions of gay men died. But we knew enough, in our bodies, to make our world smaller together, to carve a space for ourselves away from whatever waited for us on the outside.

I didn’t know then that my father is Jewish, that his family fled the Holocaust, changed their name to Smith, moved into the Cleveland ghettos to hide. I didn’t know that they, too, built a house of leaves and sand to keep safe. All I knew is that my mom tried to keep us away from my Dad’s family, his suicidal and broken father, a schizophrenic brother ten years his senior, a mother who couldn’t drive. I didn’t know that my Dad was one of few to volunteer for the Vietnam War to escape a completely different war.

Would you come home
If you didn’t recognise it?
Home’s tryna be America
They just don’t advertise it
I always say they’d love your mind
You just don’t vocalise it
We all get out of our minds
I just don’t glamorise it

Back then, I didn’t know how dark darkness could get, or who my neighbors would become. But I know now, and I’ve known all year. I’ve written a half a million words this year about the world we’re entering, the warnings and the fear and the histories already told and the proclamations of “never again.” Sometimes I wrote in anger, through accusations, with pleas, listicles, personal narratives, quotes from writers, artists, and scholars far wiser than me. But mostly I expressed a desperation to pay attention, to listen to Trump’s words, to see him for who he really is and to take his words as intent.

Now, as his cabinet forms, I hope you, too, see how serious he was all along.

On election night, I felt so much rage towards those Ohio streets and towns, to the 55.1% of residents who voted for a near future we will all regret for decades. But mostly I felt inexpressible grief: not just for the death of empathy, of Democracy itself, but also for my own faulty expectations and naivety that we were better than that.

We’re not.

This is exactly who we are, who we’ve always been.

But doesn’t it feel like the end?
Something’s coming for us
And maybe we’re not prepared
That this might only be day one
But doesn’t it feel like the end?
Something’s coming for us
I think we’re not prepared
That this might only be day one

We are a country of colonizers, slaveowners, capitalistic overlords. Donald Trump didn’t win this election on policy or governmental expertise, he won because the country saw in him a mirror of itself, and as a result the long-awaited permission to take the mask off.

There was a Nazi rally in Columbus, Ohio yesterday. Light of day, right in the middle of the city’s queerest, most charming neighborhood. In a statement, the city said, “The Columbus community stands squarely against hatred and bigotry. We will not allow any of our neighbors to be intimidated, threatened or harmed because of who they are, how they worship or whom they love.”

Wrong. That could’ve been true, but it is no longer.

The inside is out now. Americans no longer need hoods and capes to hide behind.

Thinking of ourselves, we are divided
But if you fly your flag, they’ll weaponise it
Doesn’t it feel like the end?
When we can’t even agree on what was said

I’ve spent a lifetime reading books on Fascism, and have obsessed beyond the unthinkable, staggering numbers of Jews slaughtered in the name of nationalism. I’ve been thinking a lot about the neighbors in those real houses on that street where Dawn and I built make-believe castles with protective moats. Those neighbors we thought we knew, who were seemingly kind and decent people, but still kept out anyway. Perhaps we knew, in our bodies, what hid within.

When I think about what comes next, I can’t help but contemplate those quiet neighbors who fell into line as the Schutzstaffel knocked on doors. I think about those sympathizers who let it happen, and who later attempted to either deny or erase their participation.

I won’t forget; I won’t let you forget. Neighbor, friend, family member.

A vote is just a vote until it’s more than that. Until a candidate comes along who threatens authoritarianism, imprisonment camps, family separation, anti-trans policies that erase entire existences, the silencing of the Fourth Estate, vindication against personal enemies.

Is that you, neighbor?
Sister? Cousin? Co-worker?

The numbers don’t lie, even when you wish so desperately that they did. Our long-Blue cities just got a whole lot redder, and just because they might not wear a red hat on the outside doesn’t mean they don’t wear it on the inside.

That’s people you thought you knew, who you once believed would never sacrifice a queer or immigrant neighbor, would never swap humanity for more venture capital.

And yet, they did.

Would you come home
If you didn’t recognise it?
Home’s tryna be America
They just don’t advertise it

I dream of a little pillow fort in some faraway land where I can still possess optimism that you, neighbor, won’t point my way when the guards come. A little make-believe land where the tired, poor, unhoused and huddled masses can still be free, where lifted lamps lead the way to a better world.

This ain’t that.

But doesn’t it feel like the end?
Something’s coming for us
And maybe we’re not prepared
That this might only be day one
But doesn’t it feel like the end?
Something’s coming for us
I think we’re not prepared
That this might only be day one

~

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