poor people don’t need your leftovers lmao if you’re going to donate a sweater full of holes then don’t donate shit, if you’re going to donate unhealthy and toxic food you’d never eat nor feed your kids then don’t, if you’re going to build a “house” in some insalubrate container you wouldn’t recommend your friends for them then don’t, is it so hard to see poor people are people who deserve and are entitled to want just the same quality of life that you have or is your activism just performative and you don’t want others to live like you do??
The garden lasted a few months. Then, an agent of the town’s housing authority found out about it and told my mother it was against the rules. “But no one’s using the land,” I remember her arguing. “The kids in the neighborhood play there.” The response was clear: Get rid of the garden or be evicted. Here was another one of those impossible choices of poverty. This was what my classmates would never understand, as they earnestly debated welfare fraud and the grasping desperation of the undeserving poor.
My mother stopped tending the garden and the next weekend a maintenance worker came and poured something onto the soil that made all the plants die and turned the grass brown.
I’m not sorry I have no sympathy for people who let countless amounts of people die because ‘itll all go away, you’ll see’.
For people who are disgusting racist, prejudice, homophobic. Etc.
The only people I feel bad for are the ones who are innocent and dont deserve it. But Trump? His wife? Kellyanne conway? Certain senators? Ya, karma mofos.
yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out
but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53
but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone
there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow
This is the most comforting, warm and important piece of text I have ever read, and it is so true. No life is wasted that is spent sharing and loving.
My mother never became a professional artist. She became a social worker, then later taught emotionally disturbed children.
But our home was filled with photographs of wildflowers and wildlife. Spice racks, shelves, and other useful objects were adorned with small paintings. She taught me and my sister that we could make things beautiful, even if in small ways, and let us glue glitter and fake gems on our cheap kids furniture and make it ours.
Capitalism tries to say that art isn’t successful unless it makes money. But that’s not why humans make art.
We make art to convey emotion. To make an object or a moment or a story OURS. And making someone smile when they hear you sing, or look at something you made for them is as valid a reason for creating as any other.
