Days of Love and Rage

Light, Nick Lachance

“I got a bone to pick with capitalism and a few to break”

What is creativity? Creativity is pushing the status quo to the brink of self-destruction…

These are our days of love and rage. A time to expand all of our senses and engulf the ills that stand before us. To tear down the curtains and facades of misdirection and misinformation. To fell the master’s house by all tools necessary. To behead the statues of power. A time to shred the flags that have wrapped us in blindness for so long. A time to learn, burn, and create.

This existence is hell-bent on a never-ending cycle of social damage and environmental apocalypse. This is the path capitalism has mapped onto our very souls. A system of authoritarian relations, stifling numbness of spirit, and engrained conformity. Broken backs, bloodied hands, fall outs, and close outs. A push, stone cut, deep into every pore and membrane. A stinging feeling of hatred for all others, a requirement that personal fulfillment alone is the quest for all who are to engage in the medium of exchange. It is this exchange value that pervades all assessments of use, of ethical constraints and environmental cognizance. This, my friends, is grow or die.

The everyday experience is one of constant reminder that there are rules to be followed. Silent, to the point of overwhelming coercion, these are our prisons. Bars of TV screens, cells of economic necessity, police as the wardens of our freedom. And yet we see no bars in view, to observe as such is to have made a challenge, to have slipped from our course of unrelenting and passive conformity. There is no taste of steel for these bars. This panopticon is in no ready view. So hidden that we are not even mindful of its presence, yet so powerful that we obey just the same.

There is a continued oppression. One of the sprit that captures the rage, the innate feelings that project brick into glass, accelerant into flame, one that sets water free again. One that captures an unknown humanity, one that we have not yet felt or tasted, but one that will set us free. A spirit that needs to be awakened. A spirit that needs to be ignited, just as the cities themselves shall be. Petrol bombs and barricades, perhaps, anything to have our say.

Where is the simplicity in common cooperation? In shared goals, visions, freedoms? In dances, music, lives, art? Where is the creativity? Or are we reduced to the token pacifism that pervades struggle? Are we satisfied with such reoccurrence? Or are we finally ready to step beyond the tried and untrue? To move past the accepted and worn? Are we ready to get creative? Are we ready to break out?

Or are we content to re-circulate the lies, another page in the ‘history’ book? To accept outright domination, in all its forms, of all peoples and struggle against it only in a token manner? We have been ready to accept the domination, systemic as it is, until the end of days. The struggle and agency thus far has been perhaps piecemeal. A drop in the bucket, one in which reformism has occupied bowing to supremacy. ‘Being this change’ has too oft facilitated a moral righteousness, an egoistic lifestylism that lacks the action of resistance. Emancipation is traded for crumbs in our cells. And as such we will never see the fields that will set us free.

Our condition must be one in constant uprising. An upward motion against the proprietors of control. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five rpm. Fist, brick, art, dance… These are the muscles of leverage that lead to the greater realm. Each to their own, and all to one another. State. Police. Capitalism. Hierarchy. Domination. Oppression. Constancy in our move to change is all that we require. And we must commit. Struggle to overcome the power that envelopes us. Creativity is thus our means and end. Prefigure the new means in which our lives will take place. And do it now. Revolt.

Ah, in such an ugly time, the real protest is beauty.

Create.