We all feel the spiritual gray wasteland of America though everything seems to shine like diamonds. We all sense a great dying though grandiose monuments to someones greatness keep getting built around us.

I describe a rotting away of creativity in America and I ask the question, why?
As writers we should push the creative envelope, not through social acts, performance, politics, party events, or social participation but inward facing, alone, in private, writing and composing and painting what is in our truer selves…..needing no social admiration only our own intellectual rebellion to push us forward towards some inner world long hidden we have long desired.
Remake domains long stagnant. Why shouldn’t we? Challenge the status quo. Why can’t we? Like some psychedelic pony-riding Lucy in the Sky fashioned from sone psychedelic unreal dream, moving eagerly outside the lines, challenging the predictable mediocrity of today’s boring entertainment and predictable books and fiction, splashing cans of paint upon the sad circus that is America today, and not following it like sheeple.
It seems we are all shouters but where are the whispering poets? We are all praising the winners but where are the humble men and women so admired in our distant past?

I feel that America has become again a void, devoid of creativity, run by the likes of multi-national conglomerates like Disney. We are all but relics of massive corporate buyouts, controlled by old men that count their investments at our expense, and crank out copies of creativity that died after 1977.
Little do they know they fashion nothing for themselves but monoliths to their greed. For they can’t seem to make anything that stirs us, moves us, refashions us. And they certainly can’t yet realize in this dark creative age that they cannot take their money with them when they die. Yet they go on killing culture, as do so many authors today, with their remakes of the same soulless crap.
But great art lives on and on…..forever, long after we are gone and their money is but a binary digit in a database somewhere. What fools they are! We have abandoned art. We have built only monuments to our our sad lives, not lifted up each other to a higher place through our art.
Don’t be scared to jump in the river, spray scintillating color upon the grass, shatter the ceilings with our beauty, blow up whole mountains but to rebuild and topple them again, kick down invisible doors we thought were there, ferry rivers of lies but to look back on the other side of some gray Nirvana and see it was all but an illusion to hold us back from creative wonder.
That’s what society has become in America today…..
We all are searching for something that alone can come from Great Art. Yet we cannot see the Capitalism we created in the last 30 years has chained us all to products and lies and illusion. Cherish your creativity. It’s all there ever was….and ever will be.
It’s reminders from our shared creative past of 40-50 years ago that help me stay the course….of the greatness of the Creative men and women long ago, my grandparents, who once showed me so many alternative imaginative paths now buried and forgotten. All this has been destroyed by American commercialism and the greed that fuels it, enslaving us all to some viscous competitive rat race to prove ourselves through our money. It’s why there is so much boring film, banal music, and art forms that are so very dead.
What inner rebellion must rise again in America to challenge the greedy nightmare we have made? We need its rich elixir of life to refashion art and creativity. It cannot come soon enough, I feel.
– EM Stokely