The Future

Here is my grandson Max again. I haven’t posted a picture of him since he was born. You can see that he is a jolly little boy now. He is a great little boy at 17 months. He loves books, he loves to play. He loves music. He loves people.
So I am thinking about his future. Will he only have electronic books to read, will he have to read the news only online, will he have a small electric car to drive.
As I read the news that says “has the recovery started?” “Obama suggests 50 mph in ten years”
as I receive organic foods in plastic containers, and keep on driving my car, I wonder why we aren’t getting it. We can’t recover back to what we did or my grandson and everyone else won’t even have a planet to live on. I feel as though I am living in an alternate reality. Do the people working for plastic industries have grandchildren, do car manufacturers have grandchildren? Why aren’t we talking about tiny vehicles like the parking people drive, why aren’t we just totally getting completely a new perspective.
We can’t recover back to building more sprawl, on the road suspended.

Then there is a family on my block who has lived here for about forty years. They lost their house because of a 20,ooo dollar loan. It was auctioned for 120,000. bought by a developer, who is remodelling and will get probably 450,000 for it. Is this recovery? I call it inhumanity and greed.

And then there is the scandal of health care. In the one year I had insurance I saw the way the doctors were milking the system scandalously requiring unnecessary tests etc.

I am teaching my favorite subject, Art and Politics in the 1930s. at the moment, the subject of my previous book ( ten years ago). At that time artists worked in collectives encouraging each other to represent the problems with capitalism, with racism, with health care, with poverty.
Where are those artists now when we need them to re -imagine our planet completely. Where are those artists putting pressure on the government to completely change directions.
Where is imagination going? A strange article in the New York Times yesterday talked about artists “hard times loosens creativity” . Apparently lack of sales is encouraging artists to think more creatively. That was the way the colletives started in the 1930s, no sales, so they could do what they wanted, and what they wanted was to address the problems of the world.
I hope that happens again!