Look around, what do you see?
Much like you, I could write an unending list of humanity’s failures. Corruption, greed, murder, wars, genocides, man-made famines, and the list could go on and on and on. So why?
Why write? It makes no money.
Why create art? It makes no money.
Why sing? It makes no money.
I know why. We have to. There is no pretending to be human without art, whether it’s song, sonnets, stories, photos, drawings, animation or sculpture.
And you might have heard this before, but I don’t think you have.
I don’t think you heard me at all. The title isn’t rhetorical… And we don’t just do art because we have to, it goes deeper than that.
What do you see? Around you, realistically, objectively. Wealth inequality, another genocide or two, wars, housing crisis, global warming, rising fascism, the fall of an empire or two, for whatever reasons men have a loneliness epidemic they can’t seem to figure it out. And what do all these have in common? No love.
No one that loves kills, genocides, makes others suffer for their own benefit. No one that loves, blames someone else for their own failures as a human being. Sure, you can broadly gesture to the whole system, but blaming all women for your loneliness, that’s on you, not the system.
At the core of everything what is lacking is love. We have no education about love, how to deal with it, how to create it, how to cherish it and how to give it in a healthy way. And love is in all our lives. Whether you love a movie, tv show, animation, character, book, piece of music, person, animal, tool, accessory, piece of clothing or shoe. You can not escape love. And when we do not know how to deal with love, we do not know how to deal with much of anything, really. So, we shun it.
And thus we shun art. Art is nothing but love, expressed through a myriad of ways. And when we make an enemy of art, we make an enemy of love. Whether we vilify it and call it a political stance, or woke, it is never a good idea to vilify art nor love. When you do, you shun your humanity, as there is no part of your life that must not have love for others, nature, and everything that is good in this world.
There is no other way to look at it. To look at those that are doing everything that is morally apprehensible and not to see their lack of love. For their neighbor, for their families, for those less fortunate, for those that need some help, for those having a bad day, or for anyone that is not them themselves enjoying the wrath of their villainy. And what is villainy if not the lack of the compassion love brings in a person?
I tell you… Look closely… Who hates? Who creates all this chaos, badness and evil fuckery in this world? Look closely at what they enjoy. Look at their relationships, what fruits they bare, what love they bring, how they communicate with their close other. What their topics of discussion are, if those discussions leave you refreshed or drained. Look at their actions when they’re not with you, or around you. Look at everything they are telling you. And I can bet you, that they lack a healthy relationship with love. Whether it’s loving themselves, accepting other's love, their learned toxic relationship with love from their parents or from somewhere else. Most obviously, the easiest way to see where they stand is their relationship with art. What they consume, what their relationship is with that art? Is it a healthy one? Or is it a getekeep-y/toxic one?
That is the easiest way to find what’s lacking… What is your relationship with art?