Lyric Video for the new powerful song. If the earth could write a letter to America, what would it say? Would she talk about renewables, retrofitting, refrigerants? Would it take the form of a twitter chain, an op-ed in the New York Times, maybe a short simple text that says SAVE ME in all caps? Maybe she would choose to be ironic, reusing someone else’s message – maybe a discarded protest sign propped up on chain-link fence leftover from a BLM rally that reads “I can’t breathe.”
Dear America, there is no enemy you can fight, no “other” you can exclude or expel, no trans child you can torment into suicide to save yourselves. Kill them if their trans and black, and if their brown, just send them back.
Dear America, when Black, Immigrant, and Indigenous bodies pay the highest price for a mismanaged pandemic, when children wander alone across the desert to access the safety and prosperity you inherited, when Black Americans are slaughtered by the state with impunity, incarcerated and scapegoated, you inoculate yourselves to my destruction as well. So yes, no justice no peace. And No justice no water. And No justice no planet. And No justice no life.
So tell me now, what will it be, me or your supremacy?
When I imagine her letter, I imagine it comes in the form of a song.
Words alone can’t capture what it is to be abusing, ultimately killing the source of one’s own life? What is the parallel, the analogy to express such a thing? Elder abuse? Matricide? Killing one’s human parent does not also result in one’s own destruction. What leads a people into a place where self-destruction is not only normalized but mistaken for empowerment?
The freedom to not protect ourselves from a deadly virus. The freedom to hoard guns we are more likely to use on ourselves than for protection.
Dear America, our fates are tied. But you seem hell bent on suicide.
I’m not interested in slaughter. I want to sing our young people to sleep. I want you to have their backs. I want us to join hands and run into the streets of Portland, join the wall of moms, the leafblower Dads, form a trans fortress of parents. I want the young people of Parkland to get a good night’s sleep. I want Greta Thunberg to curl up and relax with a book. I want to give the earth a voice, because I can’t lose another mother.
