WE NEED YOUR HELP! WE CAN’T JUST WATCH “THERE GOES AMERICA” HAPPEN

If you've been around Southern Punk for any amount of time, then you already know I have never been particularly interested in giving you a headline and sending you on your way.

Hell, half the reason this place exists at all is because I got tired of watching something happen, reading three paragraphs about it and being left with seventeen more questions than I had when I started.

Usually one question leads me somewhere else, then something I find from six months ago changes the way I'm looking at the whole thing today. Snd before I know it, I'm reading the law they're relying on, wondering who changed it and digging around to see what happened the last time somebody tried something like this.

Somewhere around two thousand words later, there's usually a pretty good chance I've dragged y'all through at least one story from my childhood that somehow made sense when I started telling it.

My wife has been listening to me do this for years, so none of this is particularly new to her. Because long before Southern Punk had a name, I was the person who couldn't just hear that something happened and leave it there.

My wife has always been that way too, although the two of us couldn't go about it more differently if we tried. I will research something until I have enough information to write a small book, then sit down and try to figure out how to tell y'all the story in a way that makes all those individual pieces make sense together. My wife on the other hand, she takes all of that in, thinks about it in that quiet way she does and somewhere along the way it starts becoming music.

That's pretty much where this one started. My wife and I were sitting out on the Porch doing what we do all the time, talking about everything going on, and I honestly couldn't tell you what the latest ridiculous thing was that finally did it. We'd been talking about so much lately that at some point I looked at her and said, “It's time to write another anthem because this is getting outrageous.”

My wife sat there for a minute and said, “Yeah, it's like he's come in like a wrecking ball.” Then she brought up Miley Cyrus, and that made both of us laugh because Wrecking Ball came out the same year we met. See what I mean, there we were, sitting on the Porch talking about everything going on, and somehow Miley Cyrus had wandered into the conversation.

And of course my brain immediately gave me a visual. I could see the Man in Charge sitting on that big chain with the wrecking ball underneath him, swinging through the country and tearing through everything in his path.

Because, well... that's just how he is.

He's an attention goblin.

We laughed about that for a little while, and at first my wife thought she might be able to do something funny with it. We've done that before. Hell, our Fourth of July anthem, Heatstroke Hero, was a parody, and y'all know humor is a pretty big part of how we survive around here. Sometimes you either laugh at the absurdity of all of it or spend the entire day screaming.

But then my wife started writing.

And somewhere along the way it stopped being funny.

Once she started putting everything together, there really wasn't anything to laugh at anymore. It wasn't one ridiculous thing the Man in Charge had said or some bizarre moment we could turn into a joke. She was looking at the same bigger picture we've been looking at here, except she was trying to put it into a song.

At some point she started looking for another way to describe that wrecking ball because she obviously wasn't about to write the Miley Cyrus sequel. She wanted something that captured what we'd been talking about without using those words, and eventually she landed on scorched earth.

That's how “the scorched-earth president” ended up in the song.

By the time she was finished, that funny little anthem we'd joked about on the Porch had become something else entirely.

It became… There Goes America.

I think that's probably why the first time my wife played the whole song for me, it knocked the wind right out of me. I mean that literally. I just sat there for a minute because it struck me somewhere deep in my core.

Now mind you I had heard pieces of it while she was working on it, but hearing a line here and there isn’t the same as sitting down and listening to the whole thing from beginning to end. I knew every story she was talking about. Hell, most of them are things we've covered right here.

But now there weren't any dates sitting beside them. Nobody was asking me for a source. I wasn't halfway down some rabbit hole trying to figure out what happened in 1987 that somehow mattered again. I was just sitting there listening to the song my wife had written about the same country I've spent all this time writing about.

And I remember thinking that if this hit me like that, then anybody who still bleeds red, white and blue is going to feel this one too.

There is a line in the chorus where she wrote, “Well, there goes America, there she goes,” and I think that's where the title really started making sense to me. We spend so much time talking about America being in trouble, or somebody destroying America, that the words almost stop meaning anything after a while. But There Goes America didn't hit me that way. It sounded like something you say when you're standing there watching something move away from you, and all I could think about was how many times lately I've been sitting right here with y'all saying, “Wait... they can do that?”

We have talked about every one of these things on the Porch, but usually we're talking about whatever is happening right then. The rollbacks on protected land get their day. Roe gets another. Then it's ICE or somebody messing around with a piece of our history, and before we've had much time to sit with any of it, something else happens and off we go again.

It's not that anybody stopped caring about whatever happened first. What the hell are we supposed to do? There is only so much room in a day, and lately somebody seems determined to make sure every inch of it is occupied.

My wife's song doesn't let you move on to the next thing. Oh no we aren't walking away from this one because she put all of it in one place. And hearing it that way made me realize just how much has happened while we've been running from one story to the next.

It also brought me back around to the whole scorched-earth thing, because once I stopped laughing about the ridiculous wrecking-ball picture in my head, I started thinking about what those words actually meant. The Man in Charge will eventually leave office just like every president before him did, but everything doesn't walk out with him.

Obviously another administration can reverse plenty of things. We've watched that happen over and over. But there are things where “somebody can fix it later” doesn't really work. Land doesn't immediately grow back because somebody changed the policy again. If something historic is gone, building another one isn't the same as never losing it. A family doesn't get its time back. And if people spend years living without a right, those years still happened even if somebody eventually restores it.

I kept thinking about a piece of glass.

Once you shatter it, sure, maybe you can sit there and try to put all the pieces back together. Maybe you're really good at it and somehow you manage to get every single one back where it belongs.

But it isn't the same piece of glass anymore.

You can still see where it broke.

That's what scares me about some of this.

Once we started making the video, that feeling got even stronger because now we were actually looking at the places my wife had written about and deciding what images belonged with each part of the song. Some of those places were already protected before I was born.

Hell, some were there before my parents were born. People have taken their kids there, then gotten older and gone back with grandchildren, and I doubt anybody standing there ever thought, I better really look at this because somebody may decide it doesn't need to be here anymore. You don't think like that. You just assume some things will still be there.

There is another line she wrote in the song, “The country we borrowed to hand to our youth,” and that one stayed with me while we were putting those images together. I've spent my entire life saying this is my country, just like everybody else does, but I'd never really thought about the borrowed part of it. I was born here in 1976. I've had my turn walking around on this place for 49 years, and hopefully I've got plenty more left, but eventually I won't be here and some kid who can't even vote right now will be the grown-up trying to figure out what to do with whatever we left them.

I mean, obviously we know the country gets handed from one generation to another. That's not exactly breaking news. But seeing that word borrowed in what my wife had written made me stop. Those kids don't get any say in what we're doing right now. They're just going to grow up one day and find out what we left them.

That's why we decided pretty early on that we didn't want the video to be three minutes of Trump's face. He's in it, obviously. It would be pretty damn strange to make a song about what is happening under this president and pretend he isn't there. But we made him a dark silhouette instead. Sometimes he's easy to see and other times he's farther back. I liked it better that way because after a while I stopped looking at him and started looking at whatever was behind him.

And I think that's where I want people looking.

Because he's not going to be there forever.

The rest of this stuff might be.

When we got to the end of the video, my wife and I knew we didn't want to leave everybody staring at everything that had been lost or changed. Near the end my wife wrote the question about what we can still save in time. She didn't write that everything was gone. She asked what was still there. So we had to figure out where you go after that.

Well, around here I suppose there was only one place we were ever going to end up.

The Porch.

Our Porch.

We wanted it full because that's how I've always seen this place. And I didn't want everybody sitting there looking like they came from the same family either. Some of them are kids. Some are old enough to remember an America those kids never knew. There are Black people and white people and brown people, men and women, families all mixed in together. People are sitting wherever there's room. That's the Porch. Somebody else shows up, we'll figure out where to put them.

We always do.

And I will tell you this, this one is meant to reach deep down into your soul, and I wouldn't be surprised if it brings out some tears in a few people. That's okay. Cry if you must. I know how I felt sitting there watching the finished thing, and I'd already heard the song. Seeing it all together was different.

But after you're done, dry those tears and come stand on the Porch with us, because this is actually where my wife and I need your help.

We wrote the song and created the video, and I can put it right here in front of y'all, but after that I'm pretty much out of options. I can't make somebody who's never heard of Southern Punk stumble across it. I can't put it on somebody else's Facebook page or send it to their sister or the friend they haven't talked politics with in six months because everybody is too tired.

Y'all can.

Help us get this one off the Porch.

If you know somebody who would feel this song the way I did when I first heard it, send it to them. If somebody comes to mind while you're watching the video, there's probably a reason they came to mind.

I do know one thing. Southern Punk didn't get here because I sat behind a computer and somehow magically found all of you. Y'all found each other. Somebody shares something and a person I've never met wanders onto the Porch. Then six months later they're in the comments welcoming somebody else and telling them to pull up a chair.

I've watched that happen more times than I could ever count.

So I guess we're asking y'all to do what you've been doing all along.

Take this one with you when you leave the Porch.

Let somebody else hear it.

And if it knocks the wind out of them the way it did me, give them a minute.

They may need one.

Then tell them to come on over when they're ready.

We'll make room on the Porch.

Where the light is always on and the tea is always iced and sweet!

Before you go, I want to tell you something because I don't think most people realize how much happened around here before you ever hit play on those three minutes.

You heard There Goes America.

What you didn't hear were all the conversations my wife and I had before there was ever a song.

Because this didn't start with us sitting down and saying, “Let's make a protest anthem.”

It started the way a lot of things around here start.

On the Porch.

My wife and I talk about damn near everything that happens. She hears whatever rabbit hole I've fallen into that day. I hear what's been bothering her. We talk about the land, the fires, the animals, the courts, the history, the families caught in the middle of all of it, and usually somewhere in there one of us says something that sends the other one off in a completely different direction.

This time I looked at my wife and told her it was time for another anthem.

She said the Man in Charge was like a wrecking ball.

Somehow Miley Cyrus got involved.

We laughed.

Then my wife started writing.

And it stopped being funny.

That's the part of Southern Punk I don't think everybody sees.

You see the finished video.

You don't see everything that happened before it.

You don't see my wife working through the lyrics until she finds the words she was looking for. You don't see the conversations about whether something belongs, or the moment a line suddenly changes the way I'm looking at the whole thing. You don't see us sitting there trying to figure out how the hell you take something that exists on a piece of paper and turn it into three minutes of images that actually make you feel what those words are saying.

My wife wrote There Goes America and created the video you just watched.

And I can't begin to tell you how much work went into those three minutes.

That's how Southern Punk works.

Sometimes I tell the bigger story through a three-thousand-word write-up that sends me down seventeen rabbit holes and leaves me with enough tabs open to frighten a normal person.

Sometimes it's a video.

And sometimes my wife takes everything we've been talking about and finds a way to tell that same bigger story through music.

None of it happens quickly.

Southern Punk is my job now, and doing this the way we do it takes time.

A lot of it.

There isn't a corporation sitting behind Southern Punk paying for those hours. Nobody is handing us a production budget for a song like There Goes America. There isn't somebody somewhere deciding which story is worth our time because an algorithm says it'll generate enough clicks.

It's us.

And it's y'all.

That's why subscriptions matter so much around here.

If you subscribe to Southern Punk on Substack, you're supporting the writing, the research and the digging that goes into everything you see here.

If you subscribe on Facebook or Instagram, you're helping support the videos.

And now you're also helping give us the time to do things like this.

Because I want my wife to be able to write another song when something gets under her skin.

I want us to be able to spend the time making a video like this instead of looking at the clock and thinking we can't afford to spend another day on it.

I want Southern Punk to stay exactly what it has always been.

Independent.

A place where I can see something that makes me go, “Wait a damn minute,” and follow it wherever the hell it goes.

A place where my wife can look at the same bigger picture and turn it into something like There Goes America.

And a place where the people sitting on this Porch are the reason we're able to keep doing either one.

Paid subscribers also get a seat on the Porch Council and a voice in what we investigate next, and this week we're adding something I've been waiting a long damn time to do.

Southern Punk Uncensored.

No wondering whether Facebook is going to throw a fit. No trying to guess what perfectly normal word TikTok has decided it hates today.

I'm taking the filter off.

And all of that is less than 34 cents a day.

If you've been sitting on the Porch for a while and you've thought about becoming a paid subscriber, and you're able to do it, I'd love to have you.

Really.

And if paying for a subscription isn't something you can do right now, please don't feel bad about that.

Especially with this one.

Help us get There Goes America off the Porch.

Share the video. Send it to somebody you think needs to hear it. Let somebody who has never heard of Southern Punk find their way here because you looked at them and thought, “You need to listen to this.”

That matters more than you probably realize.

And if you feel led to help keep the Porch light on directly, you can do that through BMAC:

https://buymeacoffee.com/southernpunk

However you support this place, thank you.

Because those three minutes you just watched started with my wife and me sitting on a Porch talking about what the hell was happening to our country.

Then she wrote something that knocked the wind out of me.

And somehow, with your help, maybe it'll find somebody else who needs to hear it too.

This IS the People’s Porch.

The Porch is where we gather...

The RESISTANCE is what we’ve become. 🥊

So come join us on the Porch and let's “Leave the Noise in the Street Tonight!”