[TRIGGER WARNING: song references children murdered in school shootings]

Marked NSFW merely for the trigger warning, per my read of the community rules.

I struggle with parental estrangement over (US) politics. My parents are MAGA, I am not. Politics doesn’t even feel like the right word anymore.

People Live Here is a song that increasingly resonates with me this year (2025). It continues to help me make sense of my feelings. I wanted to share it because I know many others are in the same situation with parents or loved ones, and maybe you’ll like it too.

Estrangement isn’t the intended theme of the song. A YT comment says Rise Against meant it as a broader take on hopelessness, the perceived decay of society, etc. The official music video matches that take, and I like it for what it is, but here I link a lyric video because that broader theme dilutes the feeling I take from it.

For me, I listen from the perspective of wishing my parents would “hear” any bit of it. It makes me want to point to it and ask them “Does nothing move you?” One lyric that parrots what I want to implore of them: “Is this what you call free?”

A specific line repeated a couple times is “When we’re all just ghosts,” referring to a nondescript future time ‘after all of this’, a distant post-humanity future, even. That line gets to me because the last thing I said to my dad was “You’re already a ghost to me.”

I meant to share it somewhere sooner, but I do so today after it unexpectedly broke me down crying in the parking lot before work.