On December 28th, 2022 — as Minneapolis laid in recovery from George Floyd’s murder, Derek Chauvin’s trial, National Guard occupation, and COVID-19 — a water pipe in the Northside’s Historic Bell Lofts froze and burst. According to local independent news outlet Sahan Journal, residents had to run through a water-filled stairwell just to escape into the below-freezing night.
The incident displaced 21 families, mainly families of color, in the dead of a Minnesota winter. Negligence leading up to and after the incident left the roughly 50 displaced people with little else but each other and their voices in their fight for justice against their landlord and the City of Minneapolis.
Like the Bell Lofts residents, hundreds of millions of Americans have been left to fend for themselves in a variety of traumatic ways.
There was no better place in the Twin Cities to set the “My Fellow Americans…” music video as the song marches through defeated American streets, begs people for compassion, and curses the few leaders truly responsible for the common citizen’s woes.
Not everyone’s struggle is the same, but a few of the same things influence everyone’s struggle. Our votes and money feel powerless, and we are too socially ill to build real community and make those resources powerful again. Everyone in the world has recently had to live through inflation and a pandemic, but the American epidemic of loneliness persists. Our most advanced socialization tools encourage antisocial behavior like trolling and spreading misinformation, so all of these colleagues, friends, and relatives of ours go deeper and deeper into their shells.
Even the Christian Bale American Psycho types suffer in a society like this — hollow porcelain projections of people that only grow colder and more fragile as the landscape becomes more uneven.
Those who just want comfort can’t get it, and those who have it are too ill to resist wanting more stuff. Even reclusive yet mainstream moral leader Kendrick Lamar couldn’t resist a chance to run up the score, agreeing to play the gig of all gigs (Super Bowl) and dropping an album full of bangers that does not suggest he wants to “Watch The Party Die.” “My man, the party might be at your crib now,” suggests Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre.
What’s more American than bag-chasing? And road rage? And not looking a homeless person in the eyes, let alone greeting them? What’s more American than living in your own reality at the expense of everyone else’s? The only thing more American than getting it out the mud is taking it from someone else. The only thing more American than buying the latest stuff is buying what’s next, and it likely won’t be a house.
If saying hello to your neighbor, fact-checking, and de-escalation are un-American things to do, then maybe I should change my stage name. As I ponder that, I’ll be following my ChatGPT-designed job search strategy while tracking my Vanguard ETF investment and smashing a Double Butterburger with cheese.
Stream “My Fellow Americans…” by Zander, an American everywhere an algorithm tells you what to listen to
