Cancel Your Reality Show

Cancel Your Reality Show

Clay Steakley
Books, Visual Arts, Writers, Theatre, Music, Film, Articles

I started this week excited to write this article. I’d been talking with two friends, both artists — one of them a seasoned organizer and activist, and I was full to bursting with ideas about how to combat hate with art, particularly about the importance of one-on-one communication and true empathy. I had all kinds of cool, super smart ways to say it. “It’s all about conversation!” I said. “It’s all about listening!”

Then the Tuesday night debate happened. 

I don’t need to replay the blow-by-blow commentary of that brawl, watching two supposed leaders slug it out like kids on a playground, trading insults while one lies through his teeth, smugly cuddles up with hate groups and interrupts with the force and grace of a batting cage machine loaded with horse manure.

It rattled my confidence in my own power of empathy, much less in the value of art for change. It rattled my confidence in the possibility of change.

Like most of us, I was furious.

America is toxic with hate and anger. We face it from the systems the country was built upon and that some want to shore up to preserve their own power. We face it from the factions we have grouped ourselves into. We face it from the purity tests we have built within our own factions, which then splinter.

We face hate and anger within ourselves.

We have all contributed to the division in our country.

We’ve handed over our decisions, our responsibilities, our ethics to advertisers, to social media, to those whose solitary goal is to profit from our attention and our loyalty. We have cut ourselves off from one another while working under the guise of growing more connected. 

We each exist in our own cell, our own created reality. We are each the star of our own reality show, enjoying advertisements, entertainment and news expertly curated to appeal to our particular view.

To heal the divide between us, and to make it stronger at the break, we have to cancel our personal reality shows. We have to stop focusing on ourselves — our comfort, our reinforced biases and our outrage addiction — and we must look outward… not at “them,” but at the greater “we.”

The reality show star in Tuesday night’s debate demonstrated what it looks like when “I” is more important than “we,” and when talking is more important than listening.

We have two choices as citizens, as artists and as a nation. We can fight hate, or we can give in to it. Not to choose is to choose chaos. To give in to hate is to surrender our humanity.

Rejecting hate does not mean giving up the fight for justice. 

If we choose to reject hate, we have two tasks before us. We must engage and we must create.

Engage

Hate groups, totalitarians and conspiracy cults prey on loneliness and isolation. The media preys on outrage. The lonely seek acceptance. The isolated seek community. The outraged seek purpose and attention. These groups provide a philosophy, a place of belonging, a purpose and an ear. Then they manipulate.

To fight this, we must bolster community. Include. Engage. Become real neighbors. Break bread with people who are different from us. 

We have to vote. We have to volunteer and have difficult conversations. We have to be active in our communities. We have to make our voices heard and we have to amplify other voices. We should know our representatives, our council persons.

Starting a conversation with a question instead of a demand is the equivalent of greeting someone with an open hand instead of a fist.

Create

As the playwright Jacqueline Lawton, who teaches theatre for social change, said in our interview:

“I actually don't think theatre is a tool for social change. I think theater is a tool for building community that can then create empathy that can impact individuals. Because if you can open someone's heart, you can change someone's mind. Ideology, in and of itself, is pretty hard to adjust unless someone's heart has been opened to an idea and they've been impacted through through empathy.”

We’ve all had an utterly fruitless argument with someone on the opposite side of an issue, and all the facts we could throw at it didn’t make a dent.

Art has a feature that all of the facts, spreadsheets and charts in the world don’t possess. It has an emotional vocabulary. This is the unspoken communication between artist, artwork and audience.

When we appeal to the values we share with another person, something we both find important — family, home or quality of life, for example — we make an appeal that gets to true core values by way of emotion. True core values are about human dignity, about love, about safety, and about hope.

Through these appeals, we find ourselves gradually moving from a face-off to standing side-by-side.

It builds a bridge for deeper conversation, and creates space to reach agreement. It creates space for mutual empathy.

Art’s appeal is emotional. It bypasses argument and creates conversation. It cuts immediately to the humanity under the slogan. Music, painting, photography, film — we have always used these to lay bare our shared dilemmas.

This is where artists contribute to saving America. This is where we fight for social justice, climate justice, civil rights and safety. One heart at a time.

We must engage with our communities and we must create with them and for them.

We must bring things to light, appeal to the soul and give events a human face.

Art That Builds Empathy

 Nuveen Barwari, Kurdish-American multidisciplinary artist

Nuveen.jpg

Tyler Childers, musician


Matthew Freidell, filmmaker — short film of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”

Amber McGinnis

Amber McGinnis
Nuveen Barwari

Nuveen Barwari

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