The cynical optimist

I’ve written about this in the past and I am still proud of that blog post and everything it says in it, but I want to update it a bit, it’s been a few years and I am in a very different place then where I was when I wrote it. So here we go, this is something that is very important to me, I don’t   know how long this post will be so please bare with me and read it to the end?

I was at work today and I had the song “Rent” from the musical Rent stuck in my head particularly the part that goes.

“How do we connect in an age where strangers, landlords, lovers, your own blood cells betray,

What binds the fabric together when the raging shifting winds of change keep ripping away,

Draw a line in the sand and then make a stand

Use your camera to spar, use your guitar.”

And I had a revelation. I had been fundamentally misunderstanding what that part of the song was trying to tell us, and it’s a message that is repeated at least one other time in the musical in the line.

“The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s Creation!”

And what is that message?

Art is Important.

Art is powerful, it has the power to build community, to unite us, it has the power to help us imagine a better world. Hell, some of my closest friends come from a community centered around books, and I know there are people out there who might say, oh it’s just a book, it’s just a video game, it’s just a song, or a movie, or a drawing, we’ve seen art move people to do great things, I remember seeing images of real life rebellions in countries throughout the world with the words “We are the Mockingjay” spray painted on the walls not too long after The Hunger Games movies began to come out. The movies gave purpose and a symbol to stand behind for people who were fighting for a better life. Art gave them hope.

And hope is a very dangerous thing to people in power, and I don’t necessarily believe that this is happening at a large scale, but I do believe while most of it is ignorance, this fear of hope and the hope that art can instill in the people who consume it plays a small factor in the rise in book bannings, in the teachings of particular histories, in stories that promise that the human experience can be better than the one we are currently existing in.

Art helps us dream of a better world, it plants ideas in our head and ideas, when given the fuel of hope and the displeasure of a bad lived experience can be very dangerous. It is dangerous to hope, it is dangerous to dream, it is dangerous to create. Which is exactly why we must continue to do it.

Our world is bleak, there is so much going on all the time and I know me and many others can feel the weight of the world and get burned out, but to create in spite of that, to create light in the world when there is so much darkness is a radical act that can change everything. Every piece of art is a refuge, everything created is an act of defiance in a world that craves destruction.

So when I say, as the title of this blog post says, Art Can Save Us, I truly believe that. Art is important, Art helps us dream, art helps us hope. As long as we continue to create and dream and hope and not stop fighting for a world that is better than the one we are currently in, there is a chance to make the world a better place. The problem begins when we give into the views that it’s unchangeable, that we are stuck, we are all too small to make a difference, and if you do find yourself thinking that way I challenge you to think of a piece of art that has impacted you and ask yourself where would you be if that person thought they were too small to make a difference and decided not to paint that painting, write that book, make that movie or video game, if they decided to not put on that play or musical, to simply say I am not enough, what is the point? and then, go make art. it doesn’t have to be good, you just have to do it because then you will be adding a little bit of your light to the world and enough light can drive away even the darkest nights.