antidote

Van Gogh’s man­ic de­pres­sion
would be ex­tra ma­ni­a­cal right now.

For so many rea­sons.

 

I don’t know what I hate more …

en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion or these chil­dren.

Ugh, they bet­ter at LEAST be ve­g­an, those lit­tle shits.
 

Be re­spectable ac­tivists
and b*mb the sys­tem in a way that counts, eh?

And in talk­ing about these pro­tes­tors
I say “hate” very loose­ly.

It’s a word I don’t usu­al­ly throw around.

In this case,
I do not tru­ly reg­is­ter any ha­tred in my body.

It is far clos­er to re­jec­tion of what I saw.

And se­vere dis­ap­point­ment.
 

Be­cause I can ac­tu­al­ly feel and hear the fear and des­per­a­tion these kids have in speak­ing out against the gi­ant forces that seem to be over­pow­er­ing any tra­jec­to­ry of plan­e­tary heal­ing that there is to of­fer.

I can hear the shak­i­ness in her voice.

She was scared.

And I am scared in the sim­plest sense that the good do not al­ways win.

But that fear alone makes us vic­tims
to defin­ing our­selves
“in re­sis­tance” to those “in charge,”
in­stead of defin­ing our mis­sions in­de­pen­dent­ly.

It is de­featist from the jump.
 

If I could talk to these kids di­rect­ly,
I would tell them they have al­ready suc­ceed­ed on one lev­el of good­ness.

They are not their an­tag­o­nists –
they are not de­stroy­ers –
and thus should not be­have in their im­age.

But rather de­fine and own the terms of their mis­sion,
in­de­pen­dent of op­po­si­tion.

It is the dif­fer­ence be­tween
beg­ging for re­form –
and sac­ri­fic­ing your val­ues in the com­pro­mise –

or be­ing the rev­o­lu­tion.
 

A huge part of
the spir­i­tu­al ex­pe­ri­ence of look­ing at art
is get­ting to see the raw tex­tures
up close and per­son­al,

where the artist WAS.

 
The irony —
the con­se­quences will be the use of more acrylic shields –
pe­tro­le­um-based prod­ucts –
to pro­tect paint­ings around the world

from this trend.

Oh,
and the nev­er-end­ing ridicule of en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists.
 

Sor­ry bout the world y’all.

But the beau­ty of the art we love
is it­self an an­ti­dote.

 

—ruby roth

Flom­mist Ruby Roth is an artist, de­sign­er, cre­ative strate­gist, and the au­thor-il­lus­tra­tor of four lead­ing books for kids. Her work has been fea­tured on To­day, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC News, and oth­er ma­jor me­dia out­lets. Copy­right © 2022 Ruby Roth.

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