Simply Millennial

Over the past month I have been absent from the blogging and print world because I thought I would try to be in solidarity with the writer’s who are on strike. Then I realized that I could not give up my First Amendment freedom so easily. As a species, we must have creativity simply because our intended purpose is just that – to create. We use creativity to think of ways of dealing with problems, and to form ideas in the mind of things never seen or experienced directly.

I decided that these writers who are on strike are looking outside of themselves for happiness. Money should not be what they strive for. They should strive for expressing and creating the newness of the world through their art. It is up to them to make the rest of us see the world in a different way. What would Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, or Henry David Thoreau have to say about all of this? We seem to have become controlled by that which is outside of ourselves, primarily money.

I believe that money and big business are taking over the artist spheres of our culture. Let’s face it, the music industry as been devoid of quality for a loooong time. Instead, it has been replaced with cheap, manufactured variations of a special formula. With a few exceptions, dance and music have become replaced with stripping and a rhythm that enhances the stripping.

Fashion is a form of art and creativity. Yet, fashion magazines and other advertising have caused most of us to be pretty unhappy with ourselves. We try to make our bodies and faces become a size or a shape that is genetically impossible, and we come out looking like stretched cat faces with hanging chicken necks. 

Our literary world seems a bit robotic as well. Oprah Winfrey has to tell us what to read. And just as starkly as a World War II soup kitchen, Harry Potter serves as today’s mere rationing of creative thought. There are so many undiscovered fiction writers who never get read because they don’t fit into a commercial mold. Actually, the one piece of literature that has quite a bit of fictitious merit is the Bible, and even that has been ruined. It’s an example of phenomenal storytelling, but it’s being passed off as reality to control the masses. The more people who think the same way, the more votes they can align.

We have such a fascination with money, that even though the majority of Americans are debt rich and income poor, we still cast votes that support the wealthy getting wealthier. We shop at Wal-Mart, eat Toll House and Nabisco, wear Abercrombie and Bitch, and drive cars that were made somewhere far, far away. Dare we make our own clothes, bake our own crackers, or develop our own means of transportation. This is not true evolution because no one really stands out as a leader of the species – instead we willingly give up the ability to pass on our own special genes, in order to adopt the group identity. A lack of diversity in any population makes it vulnerable to extinction. 

You are meant to create. Be selfless with it or you’re nothing but a mere mortal.