On Tuesday, February 11, I attended an evening lecture at DePaul titled “More Power Than We Think: Unleashing Creative Nonviolence.” The event was co-sponsored by the DePaul Humanities Center and DePaul’s Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies (PAX) program and featured two guest speakers. Given the size of the event, I am sure they had been planning this since before President Trump’s inauguration, but the subject matter seemed particularly pertinent in light of recent executive branch actions, and the large audience turnout reflected that.
After a brief welcome and introduction, we met the first speaker, Trey Baker, an Emmy-nominated spoken word artist, community educator, and DePaul PAX senior. He grabbed our attention by beginning with a beautiful spoken word piece before explaining the work he does as a change-agent. Baker travels to schools to give workshops teaching underrepresented minority group students how to use poetry to express themselves. He shows them how poetry can help them connect with, understand, appreciate, and celebrate their identities. He emphasized the power of poetry as a means of healing generational trauma and called it an “access point to liberation,” explaining how poetry is anti-hate and pro-hope.
Relatively young yet highly accomplished for his age, Baker contrasted the next speaker, Kathy Kelly. Comparatively much older, Kelly provided a different perspective, drawing on decades of her experience as a global activist and war resister. A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, she told stories of her activism from planting corn on top of intercontinental ballistic missile silos in Iowa during the Cold War to giving blood in Afghanistan for Afghans injured from the US bombing a hospital.
Throughout her lengthy activist career, Kelly has never strayed from nonviolence. She noted that “the means you use determines the end you get,” and “blood doesn’t wash away blood.” She laid out the ‘works of war’ as “to destroy crops and land, seize food supplies, destroy homes, scatter families, contaminate water, imprison dissenters, inflict wounds and burns, and kill the living.” She contrasted these with the ‘works of mercy’: “to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, visit the imprisoned, care for the sick, and bury the dead.”
Kelly also showed some political cartoons from the 1950s that were eerily relevant today. One titled “In America – At This Restaurant Only One Person Is Served,” by Ukrainian cartoonist Yuliy Ganf in 1953, shows a restaurant scene with characters at tables representing the arts, education, healthcare, science, and war. Waiters representing the leaders of different countries serve “war” with heaping plates of the sustaining nutrient currency, while the characters representing other sectors are neglected and starving.
Even while trying to avoid much media consumption for the sake of preserving my mental health, I have not been able to avoid such recent headlines as “Trump Administration Dissolves President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities,” or a recent article from NPR stating “President Trump plans to fire several Board members at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts naming himself chairman. He says that he is firing the Board chairman and other members who ‘do not share our vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.’” This has since been enacted. If having a sitting president serve as chairman on the board of a semi-private arts organization is not an abuse of power, I do not know what is. For a president who ran on a platform of supporting the so-called “working man,” this truly feels like a direct attack on my career and livelihood.
But the arts are so much more than an occupation. At the lecture, Kelly and Baker highlighted how art serves humanity. It helps us see things in different ways; it helps us humanize each other; it helps us sterilize and disarm hate; it helps us remember our humanity and makes us more human. Baker noted jazz specifically as a means for making sense of our current time and finding ways to reimagine our world. It is no coincidence that jazz has been intertwined with many of the most significant social and political movements in American history.
And just as jazz is an inherently collaborative art form, Kelly and Baker stressed that we have more power than we think to make change, especially when we come together. We cannot create meaningful change by ourselves. We need to keep encouraging each other, checking in on each other, and sharing resources with each other. While war and hate divide and separate us, love and art bring us together and help us find collaborative solutions.
Art is a means of resistance and a source of power. The government may be able to restrict funding and resources from art and humanities, funneling them towards agents of hate and violence instead, but they cannot restrict our creativity. They cannot forbid us to think or to love, so we must not give up on hope and humanity, for if we come together in creative resistance, they cannot stop us.