Good evening, everyone:

I am increasingly hearing – in the media and from friends and colleagues – faint undertones suggesting that rather than permitting despair to consume us, we need to see in the swirl of confusion and chaos an opportunity for renewal.

It's so very hard to carry that kind of optimism in the face of efforts to hollow out federal agencies dedicated to making people’s lives better or to push through budgets that would take aim at so many of the supports essential to the health, safety, and economic security of the people and organizations we seek to serve.

It is even harder to carry that kind of optimism as our public systems are subjected to pressures they simply aren’t equipped to withstand. Those pressures will either drive those systems to collapse or – if their residual strength is sufficient– to fundamental regeneration. We can only hope that it is the latter. Regeneration can, indeed, be a good thing. Indeed, as Cecilia has consistently reminded us, we need to think of this as a “sling-shot moment,” in which once the pull-back of the tension band is released, our aspirations are catapulted even farther ahead.

The author Maria Popova, from whom I’ve borrowed before, draws an analogy to chemistry:

This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

That captures precisely, it seems to me, our challenge. Calling on deep creative forces that preserve what is precious and inviolate . . . that look beyond the momentary madness . . . that adapt, refine, and reimagine how the values of equity, respect, humility, and grace can forge a new equilibrium.

Those creative forces lie within each of us – and within the institutions of civil society we seek to steward and fortify.

And, Popova argues, they lie with particular potency within artists. She notes that it is artists “who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.”

She turns first to James Baldwin to punctuate the point: “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” And then to Toni Morrison, who wrote during another time of anguish “This is precisely the time when artists go to work.”

Popova closes with Hermann Hesse, quoting from Steppenwolf, which was written between the two World Wars:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as [that same man would] in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

Hesse could have been writing today. Indeed, he is: we are straddling two overlapping worldviews, two operating codes running on the same mainframe. But, at Kresge, we do understand ourselves . . . we do have a standard . . . and we refuse to engage in simple acquiescence. It is indeed a time when we are needed more than ever.

Rip

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