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If journalists were cheetahs and artists were turtles…
Imagine an elderly woman pulling a dead body off of a street. Behind her stand two young girls, a look of terror painted on their faces. The journalist-cheetah leaps to snap an image and files it under the heading, “The Horrors of Somalia’s Civil War Continue.” When you glance at the headline on your smartphone, you deem it too depressing to read further. The artist-turtle, however, lingers awhile, collecting enough details. Enough to write, say, an autobiographical play on how children make sense of our world, even in traumatic times, while discovering their resilience. When you see this play, you become curious about how people survive with such uncertainty and want to learn more about your new immigrant neighbors.
Art utilizes the oldest learning tool: storytelling. Storytelling induces the release of happy hormones which makes us feel focused, generous, and empathic to the story and the storyteller. We listen with our mind, our body, and our heart.
Media often takes advantage of our societal conditioning to fear one another. Because we uncritically consume more media, fear of “the other” is more tangible than fear of a disappearing White Christmas in our warming climate. As a refugee and a Muslim Black American, I am constantly undoing the damage of stereotypical representations of my identities. I remember seeing the video of a journalist kicking a refugee down to capture a more dehumanizing image. This kind of media lacks morality, empathy, and humanity itself.
Artists lend their voices and their stories to create empathy. As I watched children separated from their parents, I remembered my siblings and I taking turns lingering on my mother’s lap for our one meal of the day at the refugee camps. Our parents were superheroes against bombs and famine. Art gives us strength-based metaphors to not only understand our world but to care for one another.
Once, while I was pretend-reading at Bde Mka Ska, a well-tanned tween-aged girl on a church-group outing approached me. She asked, “What is missing in our world, and how can we achieve it?” She then asked what I needed. She lowered down to sit next to me, raised her tiny hands towards the newly renamed, healed lake. She prayed for me to get more art grants and for my back pain to heal faster so I can do How to Have Fun in a Civil War eleven times this coming fall. While a stranger prays for me, an image of my grandmother running towards the unsafe street to save humanity fills my mind. Art shines light on the extraordinary acts of ordinary people elevating humanity.
The shortest line between two people is a story. That story might be highlighted by a journalist. That story might be humanized by a bold artist. As truth tellers, our goal should be to see more actively caring citizens. We should be inspiring ordinary people to wake up to the cruelty of our world and to help us imagine a better, more peaceful future.
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