On the Language of Democracy: Writing at the Intersect of the Arts and Politics

Feeding a Starving Mind

This week I want to talk about the importance of writing at the intersect of the Arts and Politics and why we should read more content in this space. Throughout my high school and early university years I took on the studies of Psychology and Sociology in an effort to inform myself on different aspects of the human experience. As a writing student, I learned that it is our goal to speak to the human experience, so early on I felt I was attaining the best foundation for writing. One of the core principles I took with me from those transformative early writing and social science courses was the fact that the human mind is a hungry beast that craves, and what it craves above all else is knowledge. 

My university years brought me tsunamis of knowledge in the form of lectures, real world experiences, and mostly in the form of books. Reading was the activity my brain was most accustomed to after spending so much time between the pages of the books I read for coursework or the books I read for fun. The “for fun” category was always reserved for the books in the areas of study in which I wanted to grow my knowledge of, and that is the category through which I was able to find my voice. It’s within this category I wish to write for others, which is why I write to feed a starving mind.

Mainstream media in the age of digital media is a poor excuse for journalism, and nothing is more indicative of that truth than the way the public experiences news articles. When articles aren’t shoved behind a paywall, they’re cluttered with clickbaity advertisements and broken up into three sentence paragraphs that hardly speak to the claims of the title. These articles read worse than police reports, but they often bear the BREAKING NEWS indicator for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention. I write in order to bust that practice. 

One of my most favorite experiences as a reader and student (and even now) was the coming upon of a new word or phrase. I wouldn’t hesitate to look up the word, even if I could guess at its meaning from the context clues. I would want the definition, and I would think about that word every once in a while after learning it, review the definition, and use it in my head when I remembered to. If I came upon that word in the book again, I would triumphantly fit what I remembered of the definition into my understanding, and I would have no problem following exactly what’s going on. This practice is one that kept opening up more and more different texts to my reading ability. This practice helped me grow a love for reading, writing, and communication in a way that I would not have been able to acquire had I allowed myself to be okay with not understanding certain words in my readings. I would have been confused and disinterested from reading more.

I believe this to be one of the greatest failures of the American education system, and that is its unwillingness to allow students to read more and to be challenged to attain higher reading comprehension levels. How we comprehend what we read directly impacts our ability to form complex thoughts and reasonings, our ability to communicate ideas through speech and written forms, and our overall decision making. For these reasons, I write to uplift my readers to a level that elevates their awareness of the very complex and diverse world we share and that we have inherited from our ancestors. 

Writing at the intersect of the Arts and Politics offers me the opportunity to discuss current issues from a holistic and philosophical perspective when it comes to evaluating politics, culture, education, or writing. The arts and politics are both central to the human experience, and for members of a democracy, culture should be more central to the winds of politics rather than the bastardized principles of something like capitalism. After decades of economic strife for the lower and middle class (majority of) Americans, we must recenter our focus on uplifting society, educating society, and inviting each other back into the folds of American culture. We are a warm people when we sit together around a table or fire or beach cooler, and we can’t forget that. We are America, and it is that warmth between us that the billionaire boss class has worked so hard these last few decades to snuff out. The corporate elite billionaires have worked to keep wage growth stagnant, fight back unions, and to defund education. They want to preserve pools of untrained and unskilled workers to labor for cheaper than ever, as long as there is a large enough unskilled labor pool to pull from.  When those same Americans start educating themselves and start backing their own businesses, those pools dwindle. When the pools dwindle, people demand higher pay, union protections, pensions, etc.. Those are the benefits Americans used to be able to depend on. Those are features of society that still are offered to workers in places like Europe, and those are the things that are the key factors in quality of life during a career and deep into retirement. 

I write to feed a starving brain, because the world is better off with more voices understanding the complex realities of what is going on in our democracy. I want my writing to challenge readers, to haunt readers, and to keep readers’ brains hungry to return for more. I want to teach people new words, uncover untaught histories, and inspire with actionable knowledge. I want to do this because this is America, and it’s for her promise that I speak to. America is a message for all people and will forever be. Her promise belongs to everyone, and it’s time someone’s told the billionaires that they’ve had their fill. 

The language of education and change should not be only used to the benefit of the elite, we too can hold that power as once leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once did. 

I connect this back to my experiences of meeting family in Puerto Rico as a non-Spanish speaking child. My brother and I would meet many cousins and aunts and uncles, and the majority of the time we would be staring at familiar looking faces filled with love and joy at the sight of us, but with no understanding of what was being said to us due to our language barriers. The familial connection we wanted to make was disrupted by a language barrier that hurt to not be able to overcome. Love is nurtured and felt through communication and understanding and connection. Love is felt through learning one another’s struggles and helping each other where we lack. I don’t want Americans to miss out on falling in love with the principles of America because they were not given the tools to understand her principles and the true ideals of the American way.

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