strong yes
this post is about the general
The first thing I told canvassers to do was introduce themselves. Name, pronouns, and why you’re here. We all had some version of this, something to get people talking, to hear how their own voices sounded. It was important for people to understand who they were talking to - make sure you’re speaking to the right person right away, don’t let anyone else give you an answer for someone else - but it was just as important that they knew who they were. What brought you out today, what made you want to spend your Sunday or Tuesday night knocking on strangers’ doors? That reason, that which compelled you, would always be the thing you could talk to strangers about best.
We really were the best, it turned out. The primary proved that we had found the right people to talk to after all. In particular we had moved a generation that is, across the board, downwardly mobile, and for this reason I started seeing more and more about something called “millennial earnestness.” In the same weeks that a then-33-year-old toppled a political dynasty, a video of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes cringing through a Tiny Desk performance was circulating online. What non-millennials might not have known is that there was nothing earnest in this; in fact the two singers had broken up before the song was released, and for those of us who saw them live some unexplained number of times around smaller, still-cheap venues in New York, the discomfort they had in acting out the love scene mid-song was immediately palpable. But this was not remembered, because the embarrassing middle of the song was not memorable. What was memorable about “Home” was the introduction: the whistling, the beat, the words that meant many people at the time thought the song was called “Alabama, Arkansas.”
You’ll almost always find yourself when you go looking for something, and at the time when I started, post-primary, to find what exactly separated millennial music from the generations sandwiching it, what I was was hundreds of introductions, at least three days a week, more by the end. But still it could not be ignored: when I put together a list of the songs that most signaled to me being 19, 21, 25 in New York City, what I noticed was that each one announced itself spectacularly. We dropped singular piano notes, whistles, guitar chords silencing a room with their steadiness. We told you right away what we were: feeling rough and feeling raw, so sentimental, filled up with nothing, in love again, fighting ‘em off, formerly rotten and still loved. We backed our cars into cop cars and then we crashed them into a bridge. We opened with saxophones, we opened with drops, we opened with drums in a hall that sounded like people running from a gun shot that we were, for some reason, singing about. We asked if this is your first time hearing this when we knew it had to be, we told you our new names so you wouldn’t bother with the old ones, we poured up, head shot, sat down, stood up. We said hey, we said what’s up, we said hello.
What were we doing back then, between the moody fade-ins of the nineties and the desperation for a hook streamed over and over again that’s currently defining the 2020s? We were not sitting around in coffee shops and we were not sitting around on apps, for one; we were quite literally walking around with the smallest and easiest to use form of DJing yet invented. We were desperate to be the favorite person to hand the aux cord to, because suddenly we had more music in our hands than ever before, and we wanted to show that we had found, in all of that, the best. With music we followed the same pattern of this era’s explosion of media - blogs, movies, TV shows, Vines - in that we gave it our all to make great use of the sudden ability to have everything, before the next wave of the internet decided it was actually easier if everyone simply had the same thing.
It was this burst of awe in the fact that we really did have more than any generation had ever had before - we knew this because we were told it constantly, either with the same wonder we held for the fact, or in miserable scolds for spending all of that everything on lattes - that gave way to what we’re now calling “millennial earnestness.” And it is true that we were earnest, that we were loud, that we declared as soon as we knew who we were that we were ready to be that person forever. We wanted to take this new everything and use it for something greater. Feed the Animals as a national blueprint.
What happened next is American history. The answer to a question we had not been asking but stating was very clearly no. There was no money for us, there were no jobs for us, there were no homes for us. The crush was slow-moving until it came all at once, and all that earnestness died in the second half of 2016. If there is a funeral anthem for us, it is a cruel one, for did we not spend the last summer before the end was clear dancing to promise of gooooood times, good times?
We could not have known then that our revivalist did not seem to see the end so clearly. Deep within the wreckage of Soundcloud, it turned out, there he was, seemingly confused, somehow unaware that the time for over-produced music videos and jokey rap was over. Through the ashes of millennial earnestness, Mr. Cardamom rapped on.
There was one last breath, right before the pandemic hit. Now clear on the fact that the liberal capitalism we’d been sold was in fact not going to work, a significant number of us had finally, earnestly moved on to some American form of socialism. We did not have one of our own to push this forward, but we did have Bernie, who was very old and very out of touch and pretty clearly racist in several ways, but at the time the idea was to correct the millennial insistence that racism, like sexism, was fundamentally bad. Thus his Zionism and complete lifetime spent safely tucked away in nearly all-white spaces was overlooked, and his videos were good, and our favorite bands loved him. We believed him when he said Not me, us, and without any real proof assumed that that us would be encompassing of all, instead of only some. This was our failure. But still, even after the losses and the years of chaos, he rallied us. He got on stage after stage and taught converts new facts, reminded life-longers of them too, and that cannot be denied. He made people feel like they could build a better world. In order to do this he asked us something so simple, so unintrusive, that we felt the answer was obvious: Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?
It is luck, sheer luck, that so many people were asked this right before a deadly virus spread so quickly that we were forced to shut ourselves off from each other for over a year. I believe that it helped very many truly fight, in countless ways, for people we felt sincerely at the time we might never know again. The desire for the world around us to endure, in spite of all its flaws, moved an untold amount of people towards radical politics. It was there that Bernie abandoned them, first quietly, in the 2020 protests, then loudly, with his belief in Israel and disdain for Palestine.
In these late revelations of Bernie, we found that the answer to his question was in fact no. Why would we fight for this vague, unknown entity, and, perhaps more importantly, why would you want us to? The true failure of Bernie Sanders was not simply not being able to win the primary, but assuming that the politics of alienation that had so moved the right could sustain the left. Because once the world opened back up, we did not want to keep not knowing the people we were fighting not only for, but with. We were disappointed to find that, in the hopes of making everything as simple as the simplest question, there did not seem to be that much to know. The world that reopened was sterile, frigid, empty. We had better ideas of equality but we had no real need to push them, because the result of closing down everything was that we could only stand to reopen a few things. We relived the decision that it was too hard to make use of the whole world over and over again. It was easier, as it had always been, to simply be given a few hard truths. It became obvious that a person of a certain age should be an unchallenged leftist, and it became boring.
It makes brutal, heartbreaking sense that the version of the left that wanted to exist without the knowledge of Palestine would sell the idea that every person should band together without familiarity, for what we saw in our next wave was that the simplest introduction to what Israel had done with our country’s support was enough to sway whole fields of people. If the passing of Covid settled a nation into the cold knowledge of just how little their government cared about survival, the revelation of exactly how much it rejoiced in destruction set us back on fire. The flippant acceptance of being tossed aside by our leaders gave way to its power: we were tossed en masse. We were, in fact, the masses.
We have a lot of words for believing you can change the world, no matter how bad it is, if only you’re brave enough, loud enough, big enough. One very good one, one you might use when a man born in 1991 is inspiring it, is earnest.
If you want people to listen to you, give them a memorable intro. Zohran’s running to freeze the rent in rent-stabilized buildings, deliver universal childcare, and make the buses fast and free. We said it so much we started chanting it back and forth to each other. Over and over and over again, every day for nearly a year, we went through the city and told people who we were. But we were not tracks, and we were not videos, and we were not a man on a stage, because we did not have only that to say. Over and over and over, we asked who they were too.
If you have noticed, like I have, that this city has felt more like itself in the last few months, it is because we have been reminded that being who we are is not a simple, careless thing. Every life is a universe, I started seeing people post, mourning death after death in Gaza. And I saw people begin to believe it. The initial shock of what was being done in places so far away was morphing into the revelation that nothing was ever that far away at all. There had been, in the wake of the 2020 protests, a definite annoyance in the concept of knowing each other. After all the marching, the arrests, the tear gassing, it seemed decided that Black and white America should simply go their separate ways. This did not happen in the world that learned about Palestine. The desire to understand, learn, and fight together was sincere. The situation was not complicated, it was simply unknown, until it wasn’t. This is the movement that brought forth the majority of those volunteering to canvas during the primary, whether from DSA or DRUM or JVP or nothing. More than anything else, when I asked why people were there, I heard Palestine.
Thus we did not feel that the people behind the doors were unknowable. On the contrary, more people were finding out that they had the very common power to listen and learn than had in a very long time. We fought for the city to be a place we could live in because we knew exactly why we wanted to live here. We could no longer accept that it had become so hard. Whether new or old or barely even living here anymore, we saw that our city was dead, cold, sterile. We wanted to see it live again.
And so we made it a place we could recognize, whether again or for the first time. For one year, we sought an education of our neighbors. We stopped imagining who was behind every door, stopped giving them assigned roles only to be disappointed and frustrated when they fail to play their part. We told strangers what our morals are, our standards are, and we asked what theirs were too. This campaign was won by 3.1 million introductions, 3.1 million attempts to learn what sort of universe learns inside each person. It was with this knowledge of each other, not in spite of it, that we learned we could fight.
The last thing I ever told canvassers, on that very last shift on that very last day, was to take this all in. Take in their walks in the cold night air, take in each buzzer, each door talk, each introduction. I told them that I wanted them to remember what it feels like to change the world - block by block, door by door, conversation by conversation. I told them that I wanted them to be ready to do it again.
We sent them off, and I asked a Friend of Scream the question that had worried me all day, with each emotional send-off, each one tailored to each group: Was that too earnest?
Maybe, he said, but it was also very good.