Artist. Writer. Amplify the light.
Be sexist. Be racist. Be offensive and uncouth. Be brash, politically incorrect and insensitive. Be messy and unrehearsed.
But don’t get stuck there. Be real.
Be in error. Be ignorant and misinformed. Be impolite and inconsiderate.
But don’t get stuck there. Be real.
If nothing else, events of recent months and years have shown us to be rather fragile of mind, spirit, spine and character. But, maybe it’s not that simple.
The stories we live by in a society, and as a civilization, are a cross-pollination of narratives, derived from age-old belief systems, traditions, rituals, religions and literature, tempered and adapted organically by modern epistemology, pedagogy, philosophy, cultural context and the purely experiential. There’s an inherent, and perhaps predictable narrowing, or reduction, of the “allowable” within these structures. And because of an inevitable tendency toward identity and ideology, our struggles individually and socially arise as and when this unconscious mechanism is either unwittingly or deliberately used against us.
I was walking on the beach at low tide the other day, amazed at how much sandy goodness hides under all that salty brine. I came across five large words scrawled in the sand: vax, mask, distance, calm, care. I wish I’d take a photo of it, because it was amusing, annoying and infuriating all at the same time.
The dissident voice, or truther community, has always been heavily scrutinized, ridiculed, and considered to be the lesser, ignorant, extremist element of society, where fringe believers of a vast sea of conspiracy theories, and seemingly outrageous claims about our reality gravitate toward and propagate. And because of a persistent smear campaign — meticulously maintained across all mass, centralized media sources since time immemorial — that keeps these curious, questioning, researching, investigative minds segmented and ostracized from the mainstream narrative, it’s only too easy to cast anything and anyone who dares to challenge orthodoxy, doctrine, and established paradigm into the same bin.
