When I was young, and my mother flipped out in weird volatile behavior, I didn’t understand. I asked my father what was happening, and he always said, “She’s in a state.” Looking at our national union in 2016, I don’t understand, finding it as volatile and dangerous as my mother was back then.
That seems like the state of our union.
We are too busy, too loud, too literal, too angry and too divided to remember what we know to be true about our union.
We forget that in this thing-loving nation, nouns tend to separate us and verbs tend to bring us together. Look at a particular artwork with others and personal opinions and positions arise; join in making an artwork with others and connections bloom.
The state of our union is jumbled, our strengths disoriented.
But the power of our union remembers itself, regains its strength, inside making things we care about, and imagining what can be.