Art is fuel

The world feels on the brink of disaster. The decline of democracy, the rise of fascism, the threat of nuclear war, and no-longer-impending climate change — it's all happening, it's all connected, and it all has to be faced.

I grew up in the '80s and '90s. When I was a kid, apartheid ended and the Berlin Wall came down. Democracy was winning. September 11 was scary but it didn't seem to be anything we couldn't handle. Bringing babies into the world seemed like a fine idea.

But now, I don't know. If I had known it would be like this, I might not have had children. Both my kids have targets on their backs for various reasons — it’s hard not to, these days. It seems like their whole lives will be a struggle; for themselves, for democracy, and for the environment.

I'm scared for them.

(Which speaks to my privilege, of course. Millions of people go to sleep every night scared for their children.)

Do I have hope? Most days, I do.

We have the technology to reverse climate change, and building the vast infrastructure to deploy it is an opportunity to provide meaningful jobs and income at a huge scale. That could, in turn, help rebalance the inequality that fuels the anger that the forces of evil exploit to further their causes.

Australia just elected a left-of-centre government that ran on an aggressive carbon reduction platform.

And kids these days... I know it's lazy and negligent to hang my hopes for the future on the youngest adults. But these kids, they really seem different. They're self-assured and emotionally intelligent. They know who they are. In their teens and twenties they already see through the lies of capitalism, patriarchy and meritocracy in a way that took me years to do — which in turn frees them to live life fully as themselves, without compromising themselves and sacrificing their time and energy in the service of an illusory promise of future happiness.

The kids, to put it bluntly, have no need for our bullshit.

Maybe I'm wrong about this youngest generation of adults; my sample set is both small and remarkable. But I think I'm not.

Even with these rays of light, though, we are in the darkness now, and I fear it will get darker before it gets brighter.

(Between the time I wrote this newsletter and now, Roe vs. Wade was overturned. I don’t like being right.)

In times like these, perhaps more than any other, we need art.

We need artists to show us what will happen if we don't choose a different path, and artists to show us what is possible if we do.

We need art to comfort, to distract, to inspire.

And along with art, we need community. We need to stick together. We need to take care of each other. We need to be each other's strength, our joy, our safety, our inspiration.

Even in the darkest times, art and community provide pockets of hope and joy. It's those pockets of hope and joy that ease the sting of my fear for my children's future. No matter what the world is like, I know they will find hope and joy in their communities and in the art they make and experience.

And that hope and joy is the fuel they can use — that we can all use — to keep going through the darkest days.