I’m not one to label anything “everything,” but this track is pretty darn close. Chicago’s slam-hip-hop-soundscape trio, the Growing Concerns Poetry Collective, is out with a new list of worries in the form of an album called “Big Dark Bright Futures,” and it is amazing how many problems, celebrations and mic drops they’ve managed jam into each of the 14 tracks. Number eleven, “Peace After Revolution,” envisions what a social balance could even look like by way of pointing out where it’s missing:
“If my body was free, the hallways of the health clinic somewhere in the middle of Texas that also provides abortions would never be found by the state of Texas to be somehow too narrow, and subsequently shut down… If my body was free, my camera would be my camera and my camera wouldn’t also be at times my only means for defense. If my body was free, I would have gone to the women’s march. All the women there would have also been the women saying Eric’s name. And Rekia’s name. and Terrence’s name and Tamir’s name… If my body was free, 53% of white women would have voted differently.”
Listen here and take a moment for Walter Wallace— perhaps on your way to the polls?
Would it surprise you to learn that sales of military gear to civilians are way up? That’s thanks to far-righters anticipating unrest after the election. Military-grade gas masks, for example, have seen a 20x increase since last year, and a store called “Gladiator Solutions” is seeing half its orders come from civilians, their top seller being “a $220 body-armor plate meant to withstand bullets fired from an AK-47.” What’s more chilling than some random dude in body armor is that he comes with company: membership in armed groups is also growing, as evidenced by a surge in usership of the militia directory, MyMilitia.com (or as they call it, “An American Patriot Network”).
Vice says we’re on the brink of a new and very different civil war. Some experts say we’re already in one, and we just haven’t noticed because there aren’t two organized sides. What does seem clear is that, whatever’s going on, it’ll still be here after Tuesday.
Sometimes, if this brings you any peace, going rogue doesn’t turn out as planned. To help lift that cloud I just pulled over your head, please enjoy this delightful review of Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s book about a group of libertarians who tried to colonize a town in New Hampshire, only to be foiled by bears. As you might expect, they found that “the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.” That is, when you set up a rural life with no real survivalist knowledge and also no rules, it turns out that some people feed the bears while others throw firecrackers at them, which ultimately leads to bears mauling residents in their homes. What’s more, when you choose to set up in an already-pretty-libertarian area, the state can’t swoop in to deal with the bear problem since its tax-hating residents have left it so under-resourced. I hope we’re thinking the same thing here, which is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too— you have to share some with the wildlife.
While we’re on failed utopias, please also read my pal Britta Lokting’s knockout magazine story on a group of Hasidim who, in their quest to set up camp upstate New York, committed the largest act of federal voter fraud in modern US history. As she explains with her co-author Sam Adler-Bell, this is a truly classic American tale.
We’ll stray from the body shield and stick with regular clothes, thanks. But please make them functional. In that vein, good news: a couple of ex-Under Armour execs are now making jeans that infuse Italian denim with the comfy athletic yarn that makes football uniforms and yoga pants. They’re selling direct-to-consumer (classic) so the price is on point for delivering the jean-sweatpant hybrid that pandemic-you has been looking for. Check out Revtown here.
