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\n\tThis article was adapted and expanded from the country-music newsletter Don\u2019t Rock the Inbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m not going to lie to you, newsletter readers: it\u2019s hard to newsletter \u201cnormally\u201d today. Though, to be fair, I could almost say that about any day for the last near decade. Outside my window, Nashville is frozen. Somehow I currently have power, though half of the city doesn\u2019t and folks are left to try and keep warm in temperatures hovering around four degrees overnight. Trees encased in ice lay all around us, blocking roads, on top of houses and cars. It\u2019s unsettling that something so beautiful can be so harmful. I feel that way about a lot of beautiful things these days.<\/p>\n \n\tI worry about my city and I, of course, worry about my country. Saturday night we all watched, once again, the killing of an innocent American on our televisions and phones: VA intensive care nurse\u00a0Alex Pretti<\/a>, who was simply on the streets of Minneapolis exercising his First Amendment rights. Pretti was shot<\/a> around 10 times by federal immigration officers and died on the scene. Two weeks ago,\u00a0Renee Good<\/a>\u00a0was killed doing the same. Last September, Santos Edilberto Banegas Reyes<\/a>\u00a0was detained by ICE on the way to work and died in custody less than a day later \u2014\u00a0one of 32 people killed in ICE custody last year alone.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n \n\tI wish I could talk about all of that here, and it\u2019s my personal opinion that these are issues of morality and not politics \u2014 so therefore the country music<\/a> community should have been speaking out en masse ages ago<\/a>. But because Alex Pretti was a nurse at the VA \u2014 someone who served injured and sick veterans directly \u2014 I want to talk about why country music,\u00a0which prides itself<\/a> on serving and honoring soldiers, veterans, and military families and has a longstanding relationship with military service, has remained mostly silent.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPretti had, for the last five years, worked as an Intensive Care Unit nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. He took care of critically ill veterans, and\u00a0read their final salutes when they die<\/a>d<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\t\u201c[Pretti] was patient. He answered all of our questions. He was a genuine person, and it was obvious that he truly cared about what we were going through,\u201d\u00a0said Jean Trebus<\/a>, whose father was a Vietnam War veteran and received care from Pretti.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThis is all the kind of work that country music \u2014 while usually claiming to be \u201cnot about politics,\u201d\u00a0though that has changed during Trump 2.0\u00a0<\/a>\u2014 would usually praise (and deservedly so). Artists like John Rich, Lee Greenwood, Jason Aldean, Kid Rock, Trace Adkins, Chris Janson, and many others have made helping veterans a huge part of their platform, and the genre has a long and storied history of songs about the indignities and tragedies of war, from Loretta Lynn\u2019s \u201cDear Uncle Sam\u201d to the Chicks\u2019 \u201cTravelin\u2019 Soldier,\u201d with many more in between, some laced with more layers of jingoism than others (see: post-9\/11 country music<\/a>). Surely those in country music who make honoring the military part of their brand are speaking out about someone who dedicated their life to taking care of veterans, and was then killed in the streets of America?<\/p>\n \n\tNot so much. I am not stunned by the silence \u2014 and I also don\u2019t equate social media activism with actual activism (case in point: posting black squares). But public pushback and pressure from celebrities with large platforms is impactful, especially in an arena they claim to care about most and have an opportunity to lead and educate their fans about. But what has John Rich been posting since Saturday? Other than retweeting a blatantly untrue tweet<\/a> from Homeland Security, he\u2019s mostly been sharing pictures of\u00a0his frozen trees<\/a>. Aldean posted sledding photos. Greenwood is still riding on the success of \u201cGod Bless the USA\u201d and Kid Rock is<\/a>\u2026I have no idea, but it\u2019s not talking about the killing of someone who worked with veterans. None of them are showing up for Pretti\u2019s family publicly, leading fundraisers or commenting on the death.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tMy grandfather was a veteran. The work that country music does is undoubtably important, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how it\u2019s been used politically or as branding for artists who haven\u2019t spent any time serving themselves (I always find it interesting how eager they are to suck up the energy and attention and not focus on platforming actual country music veterans,\u00a0like Michael Trotter Jr. of the War and Treaty<\/a>, who served in live combat and still suffers from PTSD). So, if this isn\u2019t about \u201cpolitics,\u201d and about veterans, shouldn\u2019t country music have something to say about the killing of Pretti, to prove it?<\/p>\n \n\tAnd though I won\u2019t get into that here extensively,\u00a0Pretti was also a legal gun owner<\/a>, exercising his Second Amendment right \u2014 something that is also very much a part of the narrative<\/a> of these same country music artists. None of them seem to be interested in posting about the right to bear arms today, though they certainly like to do that when children are being killed in schools.\u00a0Meanwhile, Trump is apparently now saying<\/a>: \u201cYou can\u2019t have guns\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n\n
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