“Forget politics: it has nothing to do with you and any time or energy you invest in it is wasted time and energy you could be using productively to learn and experience and create….,” Christopher Higgs once said.
I was sitting in Nonfiction I when I heard this little gem. I wanted to spit but there are no spittoons at Ivy Hall and I did not feel like wiping an angry loogie off of that huge glass table upstairs. I could not believe what I had just heard from a fellow writer. I should not pay attention to politics? Maybe I’m the odd woman out. From what I hear around campus, we SCAD students tend not to pay attention to elections, local, national or otherwise. We don’t register to vote. We don’t watch debates. Who’s running for president again? President of what?
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I find this peculiar. Throughout the history of the world, art has been used to drive political change. Whether it is Dunbar’s Harlem Renaissance era poetry or Picasso’s depiction of the horrors of war or Rado’s and Ragni’s musical featuring long-haired hippies, it’s all art and it’s all political. Such art was inspired by and in direct response to the politics of the day. For any artist, established or aspiring, to say that attention to politics is a waste of time is ridiculous. I had Higgs’ quote on my mind when I made my way to South Cobb Recreation Center on the venue’s first day of early voting.The whole process took me 45 minutes but left me with a lasting impression. This was my first general election in Georgia. I stood in line behind 150 other voters. Men and women. Young and old. Some brought their children in strollers. One brought his Spongebob Squarepants commuter cup. Another brought a copy of 50 Shades Darker to read as she waited. There was a postal worker who was voting to keep the U.S. Postal Service alive and well. There was a mother of two who was voting to not lose her home. There was a poll worker with a quick smile and ambling gait in his voice. He reminded us that once we pushed the cast ballot button “that’s all the voting’s gon’ get done today.” There was another poll worker who reminded me that women had only been voting since 1920 and needed to be “voting every chance we could get.”
I thought of what a great tragedy it would have been to not have had this experience. To not have chatted with my fellow Americans. To not have seen the determination in their eyes and learn about their motivations for exercising their right to vote. To not have heard that smiling polling worker, with his clothes all askew, talk about how he had been working at Atlanta polling places for the last twenty years. To not have shared a connection with the poll worker on women’s suffrage. I was given many portraits of the American experience to incorporate into my art in that 45 minutes. All because I’m an artist who pays attention to politics. That’s why I won’t dare take the advice of Christopher Higgs. I wish other artists felt the same way.
