Right Here, Right Now
Sometimes a song will capture a cultural moment so perfectly that they are inextricably intertwined. Buffalo Springfield’s countercultural anthem “For What It’s Worth” is such a song. Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” is another. When I hear “Right Here, Right Now” it immediately catapults me back in time to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Cold War thawed, perestroika and glasnost reigned and the Iron Curtain opened wide for the first time to let in a world of sunshine.
As a child who lived in mortal fear of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and/or the Soviet overthrow of the United States, I remember the excitement and exhilaration I felt during this time. The spiritual high that I experienced was not unlike the incredible sense of excitement that swept through my body when Barack Obama, a black man from my hometown of Chicago, made history by becoming our first president of color.
In both cases, I felt like a world the world was becoming a better place before my eyes, seemingly in an instant, as things I never imagined would happen—a nation built on slavery and genocide electing a black man president and the seemingly all-powerful Soviet Union crumbling—suddenly became incontrovertible realities. I felt the same way when gay marriage became the law of the land. It seemed so impossible until it became not just a possibility but a glorious, revolutionary, game-changing reality.
talking about revolution that already passed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “Right Here, Right Now” a lot as of late because it sure feels like we are living through another historic moment. Only instead of waking up to the failure of Soviet-style Communism and the devastation it wrought throughout Eastern Europe and the world we’re opening our eyes to the damage wrought by systematic and institutional racism and the evils of unchecked free market capitalism.
“Right here, right now/there is no other place I want to be/Right here, right now/watching the world wake up from history” the dude from Jesus Jones unforgettably sang three decades ago. It sure feels like the whole world became “Woke” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
It didn’t just take something to get us to this point as a nation and a culture; it took everything. Floyd’s death was undoubtedly the catalyst for sweeping, long-overdue change but this was decades, even centuries in the making.
It took the eminently avoidable deaths of countless black men at the hands of a corrupt white power structure to get society to a place where it has become almost impossible to deny that a massive problem exists that requires radical measures to address, let alone attempt to solve.
Suddenly corporations are falling all over themselves to illustrate that they care about combatting systematic racism and societal injustice and iniquities more than competitors, whether they’re Dunkaroos, Pokemon, Sesame Street or Fruit By the Foot. It’s weird and performative and about PR and brand image but it’s also kind of awesome. My fear is that this will be like Pride Month, where every evil, faceless business waves the rainbow flag proudly, then goes right back to supporting the Mike Pences of the world.
I feel like I did back when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union fell, and people who knew only oppression and grey tyranny discovered capitalism for the first time. Shitty, shitty capitalism. And I feel like I did when Obama was elected president.
To paraphrase a writer nearly as profound and important as the Jesus Jones guy, these are the best of times and the worst of times. If you were to release a cover of “Right Here, Right Now” it would simultaneously seem bitterly ironic given the nightmare we are living in terms of COVID-19 and hopeful and sincere and genuine in light of the way our nation and the world has mobilized to not just ask for but to angrily demand change.
I was alive and I waited, waited. I was alive and I waited for this time but I’m also cognizant that as a white heterosexual male this is not my moment. It belongs to others and it’s exciting and confusing and overwhelming all at the same time.
It sure does feel like things can, and will, get worse where COVID-19 is concerned. But for the first time in a long while it feels like things could also get a whole lot better as well, and I want to hold onto that beautiful, fragile feeling as long as possible.
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