An essay responding to political and cultural uncertainty through storytelling, emotional appeal, and an argument for art as resistance, refuge, and connection.
It’s no great secret that we’re living in a strange and splintered moment. The kind where you glance up from your coffee, check the headlines, and wonder if democracy’s decided to take a personal day. Or perhaps a permanent sabbatical.
In North America, those of us less than enamored with our current strongman-in-chief have become familiar with the ache of watching institutions unravel while civility slips quietly out the back door, humming a tune no one remembers the words to anymore.
Of course, that’s the way of empires. They swell, they strut, and eventually they stumble. I once read that most last about 250 years. Ours, if you’re counting, is brushing up against 248.
Not that I’m superstitious. Only observant.
And it isn’t just our little corner of the globe that’s cracking. The whole world, it seems, is balancing on the edge of a bonfire.
Pick your heartbreak.
Iran. Gaza. The refugee crisis. Climate collapse. The war on women. The rising tide of hate masquerading as faith. And let’s not even get started on the slow-motion unraveling of our childhood heroes. That kind of betrayal? It burns on a different level.
It’s easy, in times like these, to throw up your hands and ask, what’s the point? To slip into the weary certainty that nothing we do matters.
But I don’t buy that. I never have.
Because in the quiet places between panic and despair, I still believe this: we are souls, making our way through this strange experience of being human. And what saves us, what always saves us, is love.
And in that love, tucked right there next to hope, is art.
We create to remember who we are. To reclaim beauty from ruin. We create to rebel, to celebrate, to disappear for a while when the world feels like too much.
In our darkest hours, it is art that gives us breath.
It doesn’t need to last forever. Sometimes, just for a few precious moments, in the hush of a verse, the pulse of a rhythm, or the impossible glimmer of a dragon’s wing, we remember ourselves.
We become something larger, softer, more whole.