IdeaJones

Tag: #art

  • Showing Up When It Matters

    Showing Up When It Matters

    The January 6 Committee hearings were televised tonight and will continue during the next week. We’re in Watergate territory again. When I was little, the school library left the Watergate hearings on tv all day, so if we wanted to watch it during lunch or on a class visit to the library, we could. It was history. The adults around us knew, and talked about, how important it was, that nobody, even the President of the United States, was above the law.

    Nixon wasn’t accused of anything half so bad as what took place on and around January 6, 2021.

    One of the stated reasons for televising part of the Watergate hearings was transparency, the idea that our government shouldn’t address something so important in secrecy. The other reason, discussed but not front and center, was that elected officials were looking for public support to deal with what Nixon had done. Had people not watched the hearings, listened, and been appalled enough to contact their legislators, Nixon and his co-conspirators would have gone unpunished, and their actions would have become normalized, part of the day to day operation of political campaigns.

    Few people are willing to lose their jobs over issues no one cares about. Politicians, despite some evidence to the contrary, are people. If few of us care about the events of January 6, if we’re willing to forget and move on, why should members of Congress risk their jobs? If it’s not a priority for us, why should it be a priority for them?A thing that doesn’t get mentioned enough is that our “rights,” those freedoms we argue about but count on, require our government to be functioning and strong to enforce them.

    If anyone who doesn’t like the results of an election can then try to overthrow the elected government, we enable the dictators who want to force their views on everyone regardless of the will of the people. We normalize force as the way our government operates and make violence just another tool in a politician’s tool kit. All the other things we argue about, gun laws, reproductive rights, voting rights, all of it, are meaningless unless we have a functioning government to enact the things we demand and enforce them.

    Listening to the Capitol Police officer who testified was heartbreaking. The harrowing account of what she and fellow officers went through would chill the blood of any reasonable person. The documentary footage was sickening, jumped-up, white supremacist, military cosplayers bragging and plotting. Trump was right, there were conspiracies — but his followers weren’t responding to conspiracies, they were bringing them. The footage of them desecrating our capitol will never cease to disgust me. That we might shrug and so tell the world that we condone what they did is frightening. The very thing we use to sell democracy, the idea of the peaceful transfer of power, is at risk. They spit on it, on the Constitution, on everything that makes us American.

    So this matters. It matters a lot. It matters so much that if we don’t show up and show we understand that, nothing else we talk about matters. We will have voted for fascism and dictatorship, and said that we want whatever lives the people who can force themselves into power are willing to give us.So yes, I’ll be watching. I expect it to be mostly a bit dull and sometimes a little confusing, but I’ll show up, and I’ll talk to my friends and neighbors, and contact my elected representatives to tell them what I think and what I want, because it’s important. I’m showing up for my community. I’m showing up for myself. I’m showing up because if I don’t, the people in power will rightly assume I don’t care, not about my rights, not about any of it. I hope you’re showing up, too.#January6th#Election2022#politics

  • This Coloring Book Saves Lives!

    Looking for a gift for an animal lover (maybe you)? This coloring book features artwork from over 100 artists (including us!) and raises funds to help pets in need. Pair this with a stuffed animal or other animal toy and some crayons, and you have the perfect present for that animal loving kiddo in your life:

    https://colormehomeproject.com/the-color-me-home-project/?fbclid=IwAR2weXqbl6hpcuHb-23w4xBcyhC4KtYBB2oNvm-mCr__adLaqhtF9oPcksc&blm_aid=21291278

    This coloring book saves lives (and makes a great gift)!

  • The Biggest Little Thing I’ve Done So Far

    The Biggest Little Thing I’ve Done So Far

    I think 2020 is called that because by September, this year has seemed 2,020 months long. It’s so easy to lose hope. I don’t spend a lot of time on social media, especially since I’m still recuperating after Covid19 and there’s only so much energy, but it seems every time I do go on Facebook or Twitter, there’s someone fighting sadness, anxiety and/or depression who asks for some sign that things can get better.

    When I feel that way, I think about 2016-2017. It seemed like a parade of the most hateful people in the world were just partying in the streets. Meanwhile friends who are gay, or non-binary, or non-white, or otherwise in some way didn’t fit what those jerks thought was “acceptable” were being trolled by morons saying that they should die. People were being harassed, injured, killed.

    I’d heard about Safe Harbor Pins, safety pins worn to signal that the wearer was safe to approach, especially if you felt threatened and needed someone, even a stranger, to help you feel, or be, safe. There was some controversy — some thought that too many people would congratulate themselves on wearing the pin and not do anything else.

    Symbols are powerful things. When you adopt one as part of your identity, you are making a statement about where you stand and what you believe. But then there were reports of white supremacists hijacking the symbol, wearing safety pins as a threat, or to fool others. Artists talked about how to take that symbol back.

    So I started making them, and beading them. Adding charms, buttons, all sorts of things. I didn’t think people would really want them, but I went to a local women’s march with a few pins, thinking it would take me hours to give them away, if I even could.

    I’m an introvert, and shy, so talking to strangers is not my thing in a big way, but I did approach some people. I’d put single pins on little cards explaining what they were. Withing 15 minutes, I’d given them all away, and people were asking how to make them.

    I felt the need to stand and make a statement, and others did, too. One young woman gave me the idea to put two pins on a card, one to keep, one to give away. I took time off from everything else I was doing and, with the help of my husband, made over 2,000 pins in total by the end of the project. I got hand cramps, calluses, and more pin pricks that I can count.

    We visited San Francisco during the anniversary of the Summer of Love. We visited Los Angeles. We talked to people from around the world and around the U.S., including people from every political party. We talked to people from many economic backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems. This was designed not to be a political project. Over 1,000 people were stopped by a stranger and asked if they would like a pin. The meaning of the pin was explained, and that wearing it was a symbol that you believed all people — including those you don’t understand, those you disagree with, even those you dislike — deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

    And they did. In overwhelming numbers. Parents talked to their children about respect and how they treat people. Teens talked about why they give respect to some people but not others. Adults talked about their fears for friends, family.

    We were hugged fairly often. Kissed once by a tourist from Paris. Offered money (which we declined. A gift is a gift). Some people cried. Too often, we heard from people who had been going through rough experiences, being bullied, hurt and otherwise abused. People told us who their second pin was going to. We were privileged to be included in conversations people had with their kids, friends, significant others about how they choose who to be kind to and why – and that it is a choice.

    Now, with so much violence and anger, the threat of a global pandemic and a future that looks even more uncertain than usual, I think about more than 1,000 people, stopped by a stranger, standing up in front of other strangers, talking about freedom, kindness, and the worth of human life, and making a conscious choice to state their belief in the value of every human being.

    They walked away taller, beacons of light in the darkness. And they are still out there. THAT is what I reflect on when the world is chaotic and frightening. Over 1,000 people, and the even larger number who contributed to them being who they are.

    If you see this and you happen to be one of them. Thank you. You light my way in my dark hours.

    Should you want to read short stories from the project, just search for #lovebeads to find stories from our adventures.

  • Making It In The Covid Era

    We’re making what we can out of what we have to work with. How about you?

    April 14, 2020

    Hi! How y’all doin’?

    My fifth week of being in medical isolation (isolation from everyone as ordered by a doctor) is winding down, with week 6 on the way. I’m going to need to create a new coloring page for my window! This one is almost filled in.

    When I walked in here and closed the door, shutting Mark, our dogs and everyone else on the other side, they thought I might be in here for two weeks. Then two weeks became four, and now it’s open-ended. It’s required some adjustment. I’m sure your life has, too.

    I was just talking to someone about how everything has changed. Grocery shopping. No more “Oh, we’re out of X, I’ll just dash down to the store…” No, Mark and I order our groceries two weeks in advance (“What do you think you’ll want for lunch in two weeks?”) and play the food lottery (“Did we get popcorn this time?”). For my friend, going to the store requires that she suit up in a home-grown hazmat suit and line up outside the store to be let in by the bouncers as if she’s trying to get into an exclusive night club. The whole trip she has to worry about people who won’t maintain proper distancing. By the time she gets home, she’s done. It’s exhausting.

    Of course, it’s worse for grocery store employees. People who just don’t seem capable of understanding what’s going on are angry and confused, and take it out on the grocery store employees, most of whom are doing their best in a difficult time and hoping not to get sick. Our local grocery store is really doing a good job of contact-free pick up, although the manager of a local Target went off on Mark, somehow thinking Mark would put the staff at risk sitting in his car, masked and gloved, with the windows rolled up, while someone put our order in the trunk of our car.

    It’s a surreal time to be alive, ain’t it?

    Meantime, although kids who went on Spring Break to party, then got sick, seem not to have talked to their friends, who think the “right to party” the Beastie Boys sang about is actually in the Constitution. They just had to shut down a club open in defiance of shelter-in-place orders. Did those kids have direct word from God that they and everyone they knew was immune? Are they just as dumb as a bag of hair? No idea.

    We are for sure seeing who is a team player and who, definitely, is not. Everyone on Team Survival is hanging in there, doing what they can, staying home if they possibly can, physical distancing… and it’s working. Where people are doing that, they’re flattening the curve.

    It’s clearly up to us to save each other. God knows the feds aren’t going to, not with Dear Donny at the helm. The thing he’s working hardest at right now is attempting to shift blame. He’s never worked so hard in his life. He wants the states to be responsible for themselves without looking to the federal government for help. Wait — isn’t that why we have a federal government? Our President-at-the-moment is, sadly, about as useful in a crisis as tits on a bicycle.

    So we stand together by standing apart. We wash our hands like it’s our holy calling, figure out what meals we can make out of what’s in the cupboard and whatever we were lucky enough to get from the grocery store, don’t go out or gather unless we must, wear our home-made masks when we do, and send this thing back to whatever suburb of hell it came from. When there’s a vaccine, we line up (is anyone still an anti-vaxxer now?), and stick out our arms, our butts, whatever’s required.

    And years from now, we sit down kids who weren’t yet born when this happened, and we bore them silly with our survival tales of how we got through the Great Pandemic of 2020. We will have earned that right. Most of us, anyway.

    If your story is how you ignored it all and went on partying, please keep quiet. These are impressionable children, and you shouldn’t help make them stupid.

    Hang in there, y’all!