How the Creative Response of Artists and Activists Can Transform the World | Antonio D'Ambrosio, The Nation

Here's a wonderful, hopeful article for musicians, artists, writers, designers, photographers, activists and other innovative, creative people. It's also an inspiring article for everyone who appreciates and values creativity, creative people and creative thinking.

Writes Antonio D'Ambrosio (emphasis added):

For me, creative response is the antidote to the individualism, consumerism and cynicism that now define our culture. ...

[C]reative response can shift how we think, how we see; it leads us to feel something different about our experience and the world. It advances the odd, the idiosyncratic, the impossible; its elusiveness is both anti-ideological and universal as it rallies us around our common humanity. It compels us to take an active participation in the world by challenging the destructive ideologies—corporate hegemony, mass media dominance, jingoism and cultural chauvinism—that corrupt our society. ...

His concluding paragraph:

Ultimately, creative response insists that each of us maintain the courage of our convictions to meet the extraordinary challenges that confront our world. It’s this spirit that answers the question "Who owns the future?" The new, emerging "we" own the future: because our rejection of cynicism and apathy free us from the trap of history’s bad ideologies; because embracing compassion as a cornerstone of democracy allows us to imagine ourselves in the position of another; because transforming the narrow thinking of the past and problems of the present opens up possibilities for the future; and because the moment we see ourselves as citizens of the world, the future is ours.