My last post for BorderTalksBlog is dated February 3, 2012. I was two years out from having received my MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. My writing interests had taken me in new directions. Now, on January 1, 2017, I find the world of states and men (primarily) has either retrenched or ruptured, rather than grown toward the light of creative problem-solving.
Talk about transgressing borders! In art, in life, I have applauded honest challenges to and transgressions of the accepted order not for the sake of anarchy but for the sake of renewal, enlargement, and the fulfillment of human and creative potential. A thriving community of art makers whose business it is to challenge accepted norms often speaks to where growth needs to happen, and where stagnation has taken hold in the larger culture.
The art makers of 2016 had given us fair warning. From photographer Nona Faustine’s “White Shoes” series to the writings of Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates; from author J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13th, we are reminded that the evils we had thought to be in decline are, in fact, not. These artists and others have sounded the alarm. Our society, not for the first time, is at odds with its principles and ideals.
The election of Donald Trump shouldn’t have been a rude awakening, yet it was. We didn’t believe our country could be that racist, that misogynistic, that ignorant of history and science. Yet the country proved itself to be so, and more. Years of economic decline, political stalemate, and complacent journalism, along with the neglect of communities forgotten by the educational system, industry, the corporate state, and the technological innovators has fomented a new class of aggrieved and anarchistic citizens willing to implode our very political system in order to make their presence felt.
In 2017, we will see the reckoning. In the meantime, each of us has a responsibility to push back against “the new normal” by revealing what it truly is: the old order.
I live across the street from an empty lot—two, actually. The first (let’s call it “Lot A”) is directly across the street and faces the front entrance to my apartment building. For twenty years it has been advertised as the site of a new coop building project. The ramshackle and weather-beaten plywood barrier that fronts the property is “secured” by a chained link gate with huge gaps on either side where people can, and do, enter. 
I’m planning my first visit to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, so I checked out their 
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