Creative Cogitation

There have been sev­eral recent “events” that have me pon­der­ing this sub­ject.  The first one is a law passed in my state by our leg­is­la­tors called SB1070; Joe aver­age voter didn’t pass this law, our rep­re­sen­ta­tives did.  It has inflamed a lot of pas­sion on both sides of the debate, which is fine.  How­ever, a local artist I know and respect put out a poster por­tray­ing our state as a fas­cist and my first thought was, “Hey bro, you live here too.”   The sec­ond event involved a won­der­ful woman who runs and art mar­ket­ing group.  She employs new age speak­ers to help artists find their inner authen­tic voices.  Appar­ently a Chris­t­ian artist took offense to the new age speaker and basi­cally said “Remove her from your classes, she offends me.”  For sev­eral years after this pro­nounce­ment, this teacher allowed this one polar­iz­ing voice to sti­fle her own authen­tic voice, and has finally come to real­ize that is what hap­pened.  My sec­ond thought is “Words can hurt, but only if you let them.”  Finally we are all aware of the man­made eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter of unprece­dented pro­por­tions that is hap­pen­ing right now.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, sure hubris and greed played a role in this deba­cle, but pri­mar­ily I find it was caused by a fail­ure of sim­ple ethics, which would have told any­one, “If you are doing some­thing dan­ger­ous, don’t com­pound it by doing some­thing stu­pid just for a lit­tle bit of money.”  But now the unthink­able has hap­pened. My thought is “We have a large intractable prob­lem that will not be solved by the blame game; we really do not even have the lux­ury of the blame game.   It is going to take a lot of peo­ple to fix this, if we can.”

It doesn’t mat­ter where you are, cor­po­rate Amer­ica, Face­Book, an art mar­ket­ing class, not to men­tion places where polar­iza­tion is actu­ally socially accept­able, such as base­ball game, there are always peo­ple talk­ing about them.  Them refers to any­body who has an ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, phys­i­cal dif­fer­ence, intel­lec­tual dif­fer­ence or hell, is a such a pub­lic and colos­sal screw-up that any­one can den­i­grate them and feel bet­ter about them­selves based on a per­ceive moral, intel­lec­tual, phys­i­cal or other “superiority.”

I would like to point out that we all are “that guy” at some time or another; we have all been the per­son who is the butt of the cur­rent joke and we have all been the per­son laugh­ing at another’s prat­fall.  Whereas this may be the nat­ural state of being, being nat­ural does not always reflect the bet­ter part of us.  We all stopped poop­ing in our pants at a very young age, and many of us have learned if you don’t have some­thing nice to say, don’t say any­thing at all. I am not say­ing all dia­logue has to be Polit­i­cally Cor­rect, but we should have per­sonal edi­tors which keep us from cross­ing the blurry line between free expres­sion and purely destruc­tive voice.  Face it, if they knew every­thing we knew about a given topic, that does not mean that they would agree with us; and the con­verse is also true.

As for our lit­tle rock-throwing ids, we do have places to enter­tain our us ver­sus them demons; sports com­pe­ti­tions and other “games” where the goal is to be the best with­out really hurt­ing any­one else in the process.  I think we devel­oped games as a species because we rec­og­nized injur­ing our best and bright­est in a match where they are not the very best or very bright­est at the moment is not a viable sur­vival strat­egy for the group.  Games and sports also should teach another les­son that is often lost, and that is, you win some, you lose some. 

 I guess what I am try­ing to say is once we have made our point, it may be time to mod­er­ate our inner fire­brand and do some­thing con­struc­tive instead; com­mu­ni­cate in the lan­guage of co-operation, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and, yes, even com­pro­mise.  Prob­lems are usu­ally not solved while both sides are still throw­ing rocks at each other.

My two bits. Back in my hole now. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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