Earlier this year, during the protests following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, I was feeling pretty impotent. What, really, could I do to help in any significant way to make things better, to right these massive and systemic wrongs?
I grew up on the south shore of Long Island, just outside the New York City line, in a culture that was deeply racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, among other things, a fact I did not really recognize until I moved 2000 miles away to pursue my Master’s degree when I was 24. I became critically conscious as a graduate student in English studies, and I have prided myself on my evolution, on my ability to recognize and root out and reject the racist, mysogynist, and homophobic cancers in my thoughts, emotions, speech, and actions.
But that’s not enough anymore. If I really want to help make things better — if I do nothing else — I need to actively call out *other* people on this shit when I see them acting on it or hear it coming out of their mouths. Out of cowardice, I have been avoiding having these difficult conversations with family members and friends, but no more.
I wrote “Always Coming Apart” to get ready for these discussions, to gear up, to render the backstory, to clear my throat.
You can hear the demo in the Music section, and here are some draft pages of the lyrics so you can see how I have lurched — am lurching — closer to what I need to say:
