Make Good Art

Its amazing what kind of thinking you can get done in one day when you don't drown things out with music or Facebook.

I have never been the kind of person who is good at confrontation. Everything freezes and my mind stops and my body screams and nothing that I want to say ever comes out in a useful way.

After my ruminations at Kaldi, I wandered into an art supply store. I looked at the blank boxes and began thinking of Christmas this year. I haven't done collages in a while. I looked at the art supplies waiting to be turned into something amazing. I thought about my kids and how I could teach them how to make collages to express how they were feeling.

As I walked home, a few phrases came into my head. The first was "Turn on your heartlight." Its from a Neil Diamond song that reminds me of my dad and my childhood. It is always a good reminder. Be the light in the darkness. Don't turn your light off because you are too scared to be seen. Let your love shine out.

Another was "Make Good Art," a speech by Neil Gaiman (and Zen Pencils' beautiful comic) that has been turning around in my head for the last few days. I have been thinking about how art is going to change with a Trump presidency. It could get more safe, or it could get more transgressive, or it could become more inclusionary, or more violent, or all of the above. But it will change. And we can use it to express how we feel, help others to understand how we feel, tell others that they are not alone, and that people are listening, to show the kind of world that we want, and the kind of world that we don't want.

Part of Neil Gaiman's "Make Good Art" speech is "Do what only you do best." This phrase really hit me today. I think the way we can help the most is to lean in to what we really do best. We don't have to entirely change who we are to get up in people's faces and yell and argue. We can use what we do best, do it better, and use it to help change the world.

I have let a lot of my personal art take a back seat because I never really felt I had anything significant to say. Now I think I do.

Hope and Fear

I am sitting here in Kaldi Social House, a little Ethiopian coffee shop/ bar in a corner of Silver Spring. I am not reading or  playing on my phone or listening to music on my headphones. I am watching and listening.

I see people of all races sitting together, exchanging ideas, telling stories, laughing, playing, debating, working, and relaxing. Some are alone reading newspapers or paperback books. Some are lazer focused on their screens. Others are staring off in the distance listening to things we can't hear.

The boards are covered in community flyers from Tai Chi classes to support groups for Black illegal immigrants.  The chatter and clinks of the glasses and rustling of papers are underscored by sad and hopeful acoustic music.

In the midst of this, I pick up my phone and am stabbed in the heart yet again by news of an act of hate: racist graffiti on the sign of a Maryland church with a Spanish language mass.

I sit and ponder how easy we can slide back into the most terrifying eras of our history.  Fear can trickle into our institutions. Libraries are asked not to carry certain books because the bosses are afraid of offending or inflaming. Teachers are asked not to teach certain things. Employers give jobs to cis whites because they don't want the controversy.  Theaters don't wish to offend their audiences so they stick to safe material.

I pictured beautiful gathering places like this being closed down due to hateful acts.

It will happen gradually, as it has before. We must stand firm with our values and be brave, especially for the things that seem small.

As I sit here, I vacillate between hope and fear and hope and fear. 

Welcome to Earth 2

Well, Donald Trump will be president. After years of hate speech, bullying, assault charges, incompetence and lawsuits, people voted that he will be president of the United States.

I have been taking a few days to process how I feel. Occasionally, I feel like I am living in the darkest timeline. The timeline that our heroes stumble into and the audience gets to see how terrible the world would be if the worst case scenario played out. Luckily, our heroes escape just in time and are that much more grateful that, in their timeline, none of this happened. But we don't get that luxury.

I keep trying to hope that this will turn out to be a good thing. For so long, we have been complacent because we knew our president would fight for what we believed in, and if he didn't, we knew it was not because he did not want to. Now, we have to fight for ourselves. Our president will not fight for us, and in many cases will actively fight against us, so we have to stand up and protect each other. I hope that it will give us the push we need to fight for change in our communities.

However, I have many fears. As a bi woman, I fear for myself, but that is no where near the fear I feel for my friends. I am afraid after hearing the stories of very public and blatant harassment by Trump supporters of Blacks, Hispanics, and women. While I am afraid of Trump's policies, I am more afraid of the people who voted for him. They now feel they have permission to release their vitriol on the groups they think ave been hurting them. I wish I understood it, so that I could try and educate, but I do not.

I want to build bridges, because shutting ourselves off behind a wall of people who agree with us, and vilifying anyone who does not agree with us is partially what got us here in the first place. I want to build empathy, and that starts with the other side. If I cannot empathize with people who are different from me, how can I ask Trump supporters to do the same. But it is really really hard, because they are hurting me and my friends.

I keep reaching back into history to times when the government ushered in an era of fear rather than hope. Hitler's Germany, segregation, McCarthyism, Reagan, 1980s. The time when people who were different hid their differences as much as they could, kept their head down, and banded together in secret. I knew, in the back of my mind, that we were overdue. Things had been going to well for too long, and the wheel was going to turn.

I hope that we can survive this. Some of us will. But, like in the eras I mentioned before, I am afraid that some of us won't. It could be a policy that takes away someone's healthcare. It could be an entitled man on the street. It could be the atmosphere of hate chipping away at ourselves until we cannot take it anymore.

This is what I fear. I have been living in a cloud of it for days. I keep waiting for it to go away, but it doesn't.

I read why people voted for Trump, and many say that they voted in spite of his racism and sexism. I really hope that they will stand up to defend us when those who voted for those reasons hurt us.

I need to educate myself more. I need to know how to debate properly. How to control my emotions. How to defend myself and my friends if the need arises. How to compassionately and logically educate.

I have work to do.