Our House is on Fire
A call for artists to create a new new deal. | 10 minute read
Introduction
The United States is burning, just as Rome once did, just as all empires do. The whole world blazes, yet we sleep as if our own house was not on fire.
But this time the flames cannot be ignored, and we can no longer hit snooze. Our survival as a people depends upon our ability to wake up.
Maybe it feels like we’ve been here before as a people and as a nation: the record levels of unemployment, food and health insecurity, and ways of life transformed overnight. But some have always teetered on the edge, one paycheck, hardship, or diagnosis away from collapse. Others can’t breathe, fearing for their lives in and outside their homes. And still, the planet burns and ecosystems collapse around us. Grief reverberates from every corner of the planet as we recognize the damage humans have wrought throughout the world and upon each other.
This is not the next Great Depression we’re facing; it’s the next Great Extinction. Humanity has been humbled, for we have not triumphed over the natural world or our own nature. We are united by our uncertainty, forced to relinquish any illusion of control. But surrender opens up possibilities, just as fire creates through destruction.
We can build the world we want to see from the ashes of the old.
After the U.S. was gutted by the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to ignite hope and purpose for a despairing nation. He called upon folks to move away from scarcity, individualism, and competitiveness, to cast their lots together and care for one another so that the country and its people could go towards the possibility of mutual abundance.
“If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”
His ambitions fell short and didn’t reach all people equally. Nor did he foresee ecological collapse at scale. But the New Deal gave us a framework for how we might take care of each other as a community of individuals with different needs and talents connected by the same basic dream for a good life.
It’s time for a new New Deal, crafted by the people, not by politicians. A nation recreated from a multitude of voices. A new cooperative vision and reality that benefits all and harms none.
Many artists, writers, and entertainers found themselves unemployed after the Great Depression, just as many creatives now have seen their already precarious income dry up during this pandemic. The New Deal provided for the artist and laborer alike, giving both an opportunity to contribute their skills, and recognizing that art was just as vital to the country’s health going forward. The art created under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) included oral histories, city guidebooks, public murals, and the WPA posters, and many have endured both as historic artifacts and as icons.
Art gives us fresh concepts and ideas to think with and construct from. The familiar path won’t lead anywhere new. We need artists more than ever to reach the people and unite us towards a common goal.
What follows is a series of collaborations imagining what kinds of art could be created for a new New Deal to inspire alternatives to our current trajectory, and envision a world guided by justice, empathy, and love.
If you’re interested in collaborating or supporting the creation of public art, please get in touch.
But of course you don’t have to wait to add your voice to the chorus. We implore others to imagine a new United States, and world, with their own art, a #newnewdeal.