Interview with musician (and author of my proposed new national anthem) Jeff Rosenstock on Last Donut of the Night:

I feel like the grieving process is starting to kick in for me with everything.
Which fucking grieving process? [Laughs] There’s, like, five terrible things happening right now.

Life on earth as I knew it? The things I want to see change? Some days I forget there’s a pandemic because there’s so many things happening lately.
I said out loud to my wife last night for the first time, “It’s not ever gonna go back to how it was.” That’s some scary shit. It’s very weird as a musician—and I don’t mean this in any spiritual way—but as musicians, our purposes on this fucking world are gone now. That communication between people, even if it’s five people in a basement, is something we’ve all based our lives on.

It’s really strange to not really have any end in sight right now. You can play a fuckin’ Zoom show and record stuff at home, but it’s not the same thing. It’s devastating, and I don’t know how to come to terms with it beyond knowing that spiralling down into the depths of how dark that is won’t help anything. I try to push the thought back down into the ocean until it washes up again.

You’ve always been politically outspoken. What’s your mindset lately?
It’s not incredibly positive, to be honest with you. I’m not trying to say this in a condescending way, because I want everyone to be on the right team—but anyone who’s just opening their eyes over the last four or five months to police brutality against Black people or BIPOC, it’s fucking crazy that they haven’t been paying attention. This isn’t new. We put out Worry before Trump got elected, and afterwards people were like, “Wow, it predicted the future!” No, that album was about the present. This is something that’s been happening.

Maybe this is my own ignorance, but I don’t think we’ve ever been witness to the truth that the police are actually a gang, and that there are no repercussion—as we have watching an endless feed of videos where the police violently retaliate against demonstrators. There’s wide-scale protests across the country where police have been given a free license to try and hurt and kill people. Seeing footage of protesters a few months ago of protestors getting kettled and tear gassed on the Manhattan Bridge—that’s evil shit. It’s good that more people are opening their eyes to it, but [the police] are saying, “We’ll still fucking kill you. There is no Constitution, you don’t have rights. Whaddya gonna do about it?”

I’m not a violent person. The thought that they are going to push it to that level really, really scares me. While I’m not a violent person, I’ll fuckin’ fight for my fellow human beings, you know? I really wish they would just stop killing unarmed Black people and shooting people in the back in front of their children. And when it happens, all they have to do is hold the cops accountable as you would any other murderer! That would be something. But not only are they not willing to give us anything like that, they’re doubling down so hard. “We’re gonna fucking brutalize you. Fuck you.” It’s scary shit. I don’t know what’s gonna come of it.

Right now has been another big wave of how enormously fucked up everything is, after that Blue Lives Matter kid killed those two protestors with an AR-15. Protesters who just care about their fellow humans! I can’t wrap my head around how so many people got tricked into thinking that there’s anything you can gain from not loving each other.

Let's say it again:

"Protesters who just care about their fellow humans! I can’t wrap my head around how so many people got tricked into thinking that there’s anything you can gain from not loving each other."

Neither can I, Jeff!!!!!!!!