brendan halpin

So my friends and I were on the ol’ group text last night bemoaning the fact that nobody’s written a resistance anthem for the current moment. That is to say, there are plenty of anti-Trump, Anti-ICE songs, but I haven’t yet come across one that folks can sing acapella in the streets.

So I wrote one. Well, I wrote words for one. I do not have enough understanding of how music works to write an anthem, but I was thinking something stirring like the Marseillaise or something.

Anyway, here are the words I wrote. I hereby put them into the public domain, so if you wanna add music, remix, add, subtract, whatever, feel free. I don’t even need credit. I’d just like for us to be able to sing together.

VERSE:

From the snows of Minneapolis

To the palm trees of L.A.

From Chicago up to Portland

You can hear the people say

CHORUS:

We stand as one

We stand together

We stand to keep our country free*

And if you want to take my neighbor

Well then you have to go through me

VERSE:

In the schools and in the hospitals

The streets we call our own

We’ll greet those cowards with the courage

They have never known

CHORUS

VERSE:

When we send them crawling back

Into the holes where they belong

We will drown their mournful crying

With our joyful victory song

CHORUS

*Keep is for mass appeal, though of course kinda historically inaccurate. “Make” is an okay subsitute here.

There you go.