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Jill Domschot wrote a lovely response to my post yesterday called, Does the Left Even Do Poetry? I so appreciate her words, she brought some much needed clarity to my thoughts.

I live in a very left leaning area and it used to be full of art and music, street fairs and folk art, open mikes and slam poetry. It was….colorful, diverse, kind of funky. That’s all gone now, today it is communist grey and oppressive, mandated conformity, and the zombie like walking death of meth and heroin addiction everywhere you look. Even our public art is now sterile, devoid of color, lifeless.

Like, we literally placed a statue of an NPC downtown.

Perhaps the dampness and the fog has just seeped into my bones, but after two years of really oppressive lockdowns and daily death roll readings, I don’t think I’m really exaggerating the mood. The most cheerful thing I’ve seen of late was some rebellious soul walking about with an old bird-like plague mask, ringing a bell. That’s the town I used to know, deviants and dissidents, rebels and comedians. Art is power, man.

Art is also evidence that we have souls. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel for example, was an attempt to communicate the Divine. Art, music, poetry are all ways we attempt to connect with our Creator and to express ourselves. Language with strung together words is just so woefully inadequate. We are made in the image of God, the Creator, and so we in turn are little creators ourselves.

Embracing life and life abundant is about creating something that has worth and value, something that reflects truth and beauty. Art proclaims truth, beauty, goodness are objective standards, the existence of values outside of ourselves that are somewhat universally recognizable. People like to argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that truth is subjective, but that is only true in slight degrees and matters of individual taste.

It’s a bit amusing, I am fairly conservative myself, but there is clearly a spiritual war on and so I have taken to sidewalk chalk and painting rocks, and placing a zillion colored solar lights in all the trees. It’s a literal war against the communist grey gloom and a spiritual war against something bigger that I don’t even understand.

We need more poetry, more art, more music because those things proclaim that we have souls, that truth and beauty are concepts that exist outside of ourselves, and if those things exist beyond us, what else, Who else might we be seeking?

I grow so weary of conservative complaints about “the woke” and critical race theory and intersectionality. I learned about those things when I was in school, and I am a grandma today! Where were you for the past two decades?? These concepts were officially recognized by the establishment some 35 years ago. Often it seems as if Christian conservatives have just discovered “gender theory” when in fact we are now 3 generations into it.

Don’t even get me started about the Franklin Grahams of the world who just spent the last two years lecturing Christians about Roman’s 13, the need to comply with governing authorities, before promptly acquiring pericarditis himself, but not just that, his niece also suffered two heart attacks.

Unspoken truths are like bags of toxic waste and they are a heavy burden to bear.

I get exceedingly frustrated with the old guard sometimes, the culture warriors, the staid religious right who prove over and over again that they are not the alternative, they are not the solution. I very much want an alternative, a rescue, a place to go home to. A place to invite others to come home to, but that place doesn’t really exist, in fact it hasn’t even been built yet.

I can never exchange the truth of Jesus for scaremongering about Harry Potter books while hiding behind long denim skirts and grey painted church doors.

“Every man is senseless and devoid of knowledge; every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols. For his molten images are a fraud, and there is no breath in them.”