Art Heals: Future

We are still in our days of rage.  We are heartsick, our adrenalin spikes are exhausting us, yet we feel we must persist.  Some of us can protest with our bodies.  Others do what we can through donations, through writing, through documenting, through educating ourselves, and understanding that all the things we think we know are merely a fraction of the things we need to know.  That the outrage is global is heartening yet frightening too.  We can feel overwhelmed.  Everywhere we look now, we see—not only on our screens, but out our very windows.  The impact of this is somehow more powerful because we have been living in isolation for months.  While we complained, and worried for our health, for our loved ones, for our livelihoods, we had achieved a certain acceptance of our lack of control over the circumstances of our home confinement.  We started listening to the silence, we started watching the birds.  For a while, it seemed our world had taken a pause.  We rejoiced in the small victories, cleaner air, cleaner water, while we waited for the final victory of a vaccine that would carry us into the future, return our lives to us.   But the reality, the real real of our lives,  the inequality lurking in the statistics of vastly disproportionate sickness and death and job loss among communities of color, was waiting beneath the surface of our daily preoccupations to erupt like a volcano, spewing the fire and ash of injustice in eight minutes and  forty-six seconds of inescapable, authentic truth.

The rage must take its course.  But like the fires that burn to allow new growth, we will, we must, clear the underbrush of our prejudices and misconceptions and privilege and systemic injustice.  In that cleared space lies the future.  It will be on us to sustain those who will occupy that space, who will create new ways of thinking and acting and being, not forgetting history, but using it as seeds of progress to nourish a new society.  Despair is not an option. The only option is hope, and faith in the youth that are raging now, in preparation for the renewal that they are capable of creating, with our help.

This is “Our Children Are Our Future”  by Manal Deeb.  Art Heals.