As-salaamu alaykum and welcome to Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise. Just wanted to give a little introduction to what this is.

I have been doing quite a bit of political writing recently, particularly in 2024, and been getting a lot of engagement and response to that writing. And so for 2025, I wanted to finally gather the threads of that political writing and create a home for it to continue. And I tend to do audio versions of the things that I write as well, so there's always a print form and an audio form.

So it just kind of made sense to create a home for both of these. There's a Substack and podcast, which I'm calling Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise.

But just to give you a little bit of background, I grew up in a small town in southern Indiana, and then about seven years ago I moved to Chicago. I've been living primarily on the west side of Chicago for the last seven years. And I am a musician, I'm a scientist, and I'm a community organizer. And some of the things that I've been involved with, as a musician and as an organizer, have been truth and reconciliation efforts.

Now, what's “truth and reconciliation”? It's kind of jargon. But it's jargon that tends to be used for processes that happen after conflict, after war, after genocide. It's like a political framework for what happens after,

and the day after,

and the day after,

and the day after.

And so sometimes when people are doing intentional processes to try to tell the truth about what happened, and then somehow reconcile with what happened, as a nation, as an ethnic group, as a region of the world, whatever the case might be, sometimes that's called “truth and reconciliation.”

So I've been part of some truth and reconciliation projects in the Balkans, in Colombia, and then also did some training with people in Northern Ireland. And one of the things that has occurred to me through those experiences is that…I think the United States really has never had a truth and reconciliation process. For all of the things that have happened here. From the outset of colonization. And so I couldn't ignore the blatant lack of truth and reconciliation in my own home country while I'm participating in some of these efforts elsewhere.

The efforts that I was involved in Colombia, in the Balkans…the United States was involved in those conflicts. So there had to be U.S. people involved in truth & reconciliation after. And to me, at least, that just shone the light even more brightly …why not point that inwards as well, right? So anyway, I have an interest in truth and reconciliation processes, having seen what all can go into it, and just feeling that lack here.

But then also I feel like I have had a pretty unique vantage point growing up in a small town in a Republican-led rural state, and then moving to an urban area. Not just any old urban area. The south and west sides of Chicago have a very particular history of marginalization, deprivation, segregation…and resistance, and survival, and resilience. It's all of it combined, right?

And these are two extremely different snapshots of America. But both are communities in crisis, in their own way. I have been witnessing American communities in crisis my entire life. And the crises are very different, but they're all connected. And over the past seven years of being here in Chicago, bit-by-bit I've been trying to articulate, first and foremost to myself and then to other people in my life, what I've seen, what I've witnessed in both of these American contexts. And how we really know so little about each other.

And our struggles are so connected, they really are, but we don't talk to each other, we don't have common ground with each other, particularly this urban-rural divide, which I think is really intense and not named very often. Not explored very often. And so a lot of the writing that I've been doing in this past year has been trying to, in some ways, explain the crisis that rural and small town America has been going through within my lifetime to an urban audience, my community and my connections here in Chicago.

But I would like to be a bridge to have that dialogue be both ways. I would like to ask the question, what does truth telling look like in America? I think we need to speak truth to power, but also to each other. We have to let each other know, we have to tell each other what's going on in our communities. A lot more than we currently are. Because we really do need each other. We need each other so badly, given what's coming our way.

So the writings that I've done over the last year have been focused on that, and I think will continue to be focused on that. Last year, I wrote this zine in response to JD Vance becoming the vice president and how he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And basically, I kind of like wrote my own Hillbilly Elegy. To try to speak to, I think, all the ways that JD Vance is wrong. But to also try to translate some things about rural America to people in my life in Chicago. I got such a great response from that. People have been so responsive. To really see how our struggles are connected, and see how it all paints a picture of how everybody is being harmed by many of the same bad actors, by many of the same systems, by many of the same culprits, in a lot of ways. It all points back to many of the same common enemies.

I also did a huge deep dive into the land that my mom's side of the family has been farming. My mom's side of the family is American and has been farming in the same place in Nebraska for six generations. And I did a deep dive into that land and the history of that land using a truth and reconciliation framework. And that research, inshallah, is getting published in the Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice sometime in 2025. And I would like to do the work of translating that. What's getting published is very scholarly and not super digestible, but I would like to do the work of breaking it down. Not just in terms of what I found, but what that process was like, because I think the more we do that, the more we're going to learn. Not just about what came before, but what is still going on today to disenfranchise and divide us.

I'm not entirely sure all of the places that this Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise Substack and podcast will go. We'll see. But that's the general aim of it: An exercise in American truth-telling. Because after all, truth comes before reconciliation. I'm very excited to keep going with it.

Also, a little note about the name. There's a saying which I heard in southern Indiana, because southern Indiana is kind of like where the Midwest meets Appalachia. It's actually the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. So it's kind of a cultural combination of both. But anyway, Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise. It's a play on... “if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise,” which is a phrase in that region of the country. But being Muslim, inshallah means “God willing.” So it's kind of a play on “if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise.” Inshallah, which means “God willing” and “the creek don't rise.”

And it's also a phrase that kind of captures what my vantage point is in all of this. Just to give you a little example, in 2016 when I went to Standing Rock to the protest camps that were against the DAPL pipeline, the Indigenous-led resistance to the DAPL pipeline in Standing Rock, there was a contingency of…basically like…radical rednecks that showed up to throw down for that. There was also a big contingence of Palestinian people who were there throwing down as well. And there was some moments when I was there of like, “oh, this person pulled up with the rednecks and is praying with the Palestinians??” And that's very much…that's me. And that's the phrase, “inshallah and the creek don't rise.” I'm the that. That's the me. And so I think it kind of captures a little bit about my vantage point in all of this.

I'm not someone who's ever stayed on one side of the tracks. You know, there's the whole idea of being on “the wrong side of the tracks.” I've always been crossing the tracks my entire life, and I continue to do that. And I think we need a lot more of that. And I hope that this podcast serves as a way of telling stories from across the tracks. Inshallah, and the creek don't rise.

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