Unfucktheworld: you and I in this drowning world

“There will always be more time,” is the appropriate prayer.

People can pray it, but we’re the problem; the trees pray it while they’re tall; the ground prays it while it’s uphill; the water just prays its level stays low. For all it enveloped, it did not pour there on its own, it didn’t discriminate what it consumed. Maybe the natural world still has the moral high ground to pray because it cannot discriminate. What recent natural occurrences and the prioritisation that followed display is that we’re not as righteous. We will never have that grace.

American society has the gall to place the forthright beauty of Appalachia as the least of its concerns, of which its situation is presently vital. This region of North Carolina, a perfect, rugged gift I’ve lived my life as a satellite of, was drowned, levelled, and impatiently, obtusely assisted. For all it’s ever given, this is how it’s treated.

Hurricane Helene, which struck the region in late September, was spurred on by weather once referred to as unnatural or uncharacteristic, now shown to be the new normal. It was the storm of a century, something that should never have happened with the altitude and make-up of the area, but is likely to be repeated soon. This may not be the appropriate space to place righteous anger on the onset of climate change, as those observing would rather damn the government responsible. There is swirling, unkempt anger with every passing thought on this last month, but one remains the same: nothing can kill the songs and lives of these hills, and no thanks for trying. 

Speaking of the songs, artists like Angel Olsen, MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, and dozens more, are dredging all that wasn’t held. Their homes, family homes, their neighbourhoods and studios, all of the above and a growing list more was terraformed for future generations to build around. As any number of social posts could display about the situation; this isn’t a rebuild, the region itself must be reformed up from new foundations. Being the home to artistically inclined cities such as Asheville and Blowing Rock, Appalachia will continue to be a wellspring of inspiration, but what will artists make of it?

De Souza in particular has faced an unfortunately modern situation; she signals to the destruction surrounding her by using her own devastation as a siphon. She hopes for awareness using what popular leverage is at her disposal, but blog posts ad-nauseum distract, as only they can. As the climate crisis arrives, how do we respect the individual’s plight while recognising rising tides will come for us all? De Souza answered it last year, singing, 'Who gives a fuck / All of this will end.'

This isn’t about a tragedy, or billions in aid evaporating from the American people as it’s disseminated amongst genocidal war lords and their campaigns for gross and negligent slaughter; this is about mountain towns, and it’s about you and I.

First, get your facts straight. Appalachia is the keystone of American culture, often referred to and imitated, stolen from and reappropriated towards other regions. There is no folk, country, bluegrass, or character in music without its rapturous glory. What other cultures, and even other regions inside America, can never understand, is that the vastness of its space, of its nature, allows for its art to tunnel deeper than can be understood. 

The wind sings in harmony with its artists, its people want and ask for little, depending foremost on each other. Life blends together in the summer heat and hides all the same in the winter. Distortion and acoustics are bedfellows like a predator and its prey on the same flat circle of life. You get the sense that twang and sailor-mouthed art districts are as naturally occurring as moss on rocks. 

It’s a way of living at times traditional, but with a progressive, egalitarian spirit. Every person is laid equal on its terrain, everyone faces the same catastrophe eventually; every tree falls together. Conjure not the sight of roads turned into rivers, or of the roof of a house still below the cooling tide. You will see them quite enough already. Think of linked hands and trees that hum, think of the artistic respite of a region which never took handout from the start. Think of your family holding on to one another in the oncoming current, and of it all washed away. Okay, maybe stop thinking.

No need to get hung up now, wait ‘til it’s at your door instead. But it is now, as it is rushing against mine; however, this isn’t about climate change, like I said. It’s about you and I. You’ve posted a video of your family home washed away in a landslide, waiting for a FEMA loan or non-profit grant to cover what your flood insurance wouldn’t, if you had it. There’s too many examples here to watch in a lifetime, much less count. 

You’re the local college student in Asheville I struck up a conversation with while my wife was in the bathroom at The Orange Peel. You gave me a water and told me you were worried about school. Remi Wolf rocked the venue that night; I hope you’re okay. You’re the voice in my headphones, hailing from Asheville, like MJ Lenderman singing about houseboats at the Himbo Dome, or Indigo De Souza promising to hold the listener as she holds onto what she can.

When I say 'you', I mean some other form of me, on the other end of the geography lottery. Happenstance put these artists and these families in a harm's way that foreshadows what comes for me next; who’s to say we’re not just the same, especially counted on the cosmic scale.

Whatever is coming, whatever is already here, no matter its origin or propagators, can only be met with linked arms. They may spend undue time pulling each other out of currents, but that’s our only option left. This is solidarity in our drowning world. Beloved Asheville, a centerpiece organisation in disseminating aid, has the floodlights on day and night, trucks navigating paths and roads since replaced by cliffs. Arts grants are attempting to shelter our creators, $500 at a time. What qualified as 'not much' yesterday is all a quaking world can muster, no less appreciated.

If this is how life and the breadth of its art and culture are treated as the world dissipates, then it’s not the fault of the rising tide. We failed not a neighbourhood or a city, but a culture when the rain fell and uprooted Appalachia the way it did. We may not have moral culpability in the changing climate (especially when Big Oil exists), but we sure as hell can be transmitters of culture and history better than we have. We exist and progress in a world where catastrophe takes with it both lives and art, ways of playing and means of expression baked into the fabric of peoples' stories. The greatest sin of the last month is that such a cruelty, through nature or through malicious, human acts, is even possible. That’s a sin against life, which it earns.

As bulldozers dig trying to find a ground level beneath the muck and debris, whatever they exhume will have a song and a life attached to its story. Appalachia is rife with invention, something that predatory realtors scoping the vacated area and war-centric policymakers could never account for. As the US approved funds to create victims overseas, the neglect their people face in the absence of that aid creates victims of themselves.

Learn this unfortunately needed lesson for when this will happen next: make it a fool's errand to believe anything can truly die. Live as others have lived, and take their stories with you. Then, you and I will live as a single, unending life.

Famine, drought, flooding, and exodus, are prowling around the corners of our lifetimes. There’s no time to counteract, we’re the first of many reaction generations. With the onset of this plight at our fingertips, I’ll hand out a mission: whoever has the last canteen of water, on the last raft on the tropical waters of the Arctic in 2140, remember how to sing Unfucktheworld. It’s not really about what its title suggests, Angel Olsen wrote it about love and a declaration of self, as usual. But sing it through. You’ll get to the last line, 'I am the only one now', and in that moment, you’ll be every one of us, as if our time never did end. You’ll be holding every moment, regional dialect, custom, sacrifice, and mistake in tow, and it will be the closest any of us have ever been.

No matter what efforts there were to rekindle or reshape a world where Appalachia was left to dry, in that moment, we’ll have one prayer answered. There was more time. Look to the million prayers left at the door, and feel bittersweet relief. Even if there’s only one of us left, there will always be more time.