in·di·vis·i·ble
/ˌindəˈvizəb(ə)l/ adjective : unable to be divided or separated.
When director Marshall Curry accepted his award for the documentary short, A Night at the Garden, he made this statement: “We’d like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people. But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is naïve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness.” Maybe he is right, but maybe it’s also time to stop pandering to our basest natures, to embrace enlightened humanity over tribalism. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s estate posthumously published a call for an economic bill of rights that is unfortunately just as relevant today as it was in 1968.
Just watching the dichotomy between MSNBC and Fox News during the latest impeachment trial, it becomes more obvious everyday that that America is no longer “United” States. And we have exported this peculiar brand of economic divisiveness and neoliberal inequality worldwide. “We are now truly at a break-glass-in-case-of-fire moment,” a former Justice Department official wrote on Twitter.
Robin Wright writes in the New Yorker, “The protests of 2019 have also altered the tactics, tools, and structure of civil resistance. Many have been loose-knit and leaderless and have drawn in people… neither political nor civil-society activists. ‘They all represent a crisis of agency—of people who feel unrepresented [author’s italics],’ [Carne] Ross, the author of The Leaderless Revolution, says …‘We represent ourselves’ is a common feature….It’s simplistic to think of these movements simply as protests.’ When that kind of energy is mustered, he said, it’s difficult for governments to resist unless they use repression.”
2019 had more protests worldwide than any year in history. “You have not seen anything yet,” said Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to 10,000 protesters in Lausanne, Switzerland, ahead of the 2020 World Economic Forum at Davos. And I gather we haven’t. And, just like any clean-up project, it is likely to get worse before it gets better. “Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour. We are still telling you to panic, and to act as if you loved your children above all else.”
Let the artists lead.
For this issue, we seek energetic work that musters that energy, that crosses ethnic, generational, gender, sexual orientation, faith, and single-issue lines. We are accepting single- and encouraging multi-author pieces, building a coalition of conscience and inclusivity. We hope our authors remind and show how we best engage with one another.
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